[Tutor] How to read the first so many Unicode characters from a file?

[Eryk Sun]

On 6/25/21, boB Stepp <robertvstepp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Say I have a text file with a mixture of ASCII and non-ASCII
> characters (assumed to be UTF-8) and I wanted to read the first N
> characters from the file.  The first thought that comes to mind is:
>
> with open(filename) as f:
>     N_characters = f.read(N)

Assuming Python 3, you're opening the file in text mode, which reads
characters, not bytes. That said, you're using the default encoding
that's based on the platform and locale. In Windows this will be the
process ANSI code page, unless UTF-8 mode is enabled (e.g. `python -X
utf8`). You can explicitly decode the file as UTF-8 via open(filename,
encoding='utf-8').