How to read gzipped utf8 file in Python?

[John Nagle]

   I have a large (gigabytes) file which is encoded in UTF-8 and then
compressed with gzip.  I'd like to read it with the "gzip" module
and "utf8" decoding.  The obvious approach is

	fd = gzip.open(fname, 'rb',encoding='utf8')

But "gzip.open" doesn't support an "encoding" parameter.  (It
probably should, for consistency.)  Is there some way to do this?
Is it possible to express "unzip, then decode utf8" via
"codecs.open"?

				John Nagle