[Python-ideas] Subprocess: Add an encoding argument

[Paul Moore]

On 1 September 2014 21:37, Andrew Barnert
<abarnert at yahoo.com.dmarc.invalid> wrote:
> This brings up a good point: having a single encoding, errors, and newlines set of parameters for Popen and the convenience functions implies that you want to pass the same ones to all pipes. But how often is that true?

My proposal was purely for encoding, and was prompted by the fact that
the Windows default encoding does not support all of Unicode. Setting
PYTHONIOENCODING to utf-8 for a Python subprocess allows handling of
all of Unicode if you can set the subprocess channels' encoding to
utf-8. As PYTHONIOENCODING affects all 3 channels, being able to set a
single value for all 3 channels is sufficient for that use case.

Setting newline and the error handler were *not* part of my original
proposal, essentially because I know of no other way to force a
subprocess to use anything other than the default encoding for the
standard IO streams. Handling programs that are defined as using the
standard streams for anything other than normal text (nul-terminated
lines, explicitly defined non-default encodings) isn't something I
have any examples of.

The find -print0 example is out of scope, IMO, as newline handling is
different from encoding. At some point, it becomes easier to manually
wrap the streams rather than having huge numbers of parameters to the
Popen constructor.

I'll think some more on this...
Paul