[Python-3000] the right way to open text files in P3K?

[Mark Summerfield]

On 2007-12-14, Christian Heimes wrote:
> Mark Summerfield wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I was wondering if it is yet known what the right way to open text files
> > in P3K will be?
> >
> > According to the docs the signature for open() is:
> >
> >     open(filename[, mode[, bufsize]])
>
> The docs must be outdated. open() accepts more arguments:
>
> open(file, mode='r', buffering=None, encoding=None, errors=None,
> newline=None, closefd=True)
>
> > Is that going to stay the same and default to UTF-8 if "b" is not in the
> > mode (or if no mode is specified) and bytes if "b" is present?
>
> The new IO library is using UTF-8 as default encoding for text mode
> unless a different encoding is given. The open() function and the IO
> streams are much closer to the codecs package.
>
> help(open) isn't very helpful in 3.0a2 and earlier. I fixed the doc
> string shortly after the release. import io; help(io.open) gives you the
> real open function. Please note that the IO library is mostly written in
> Python, see Lib/io.py

The API is exactly what I'd hoped it would be:-)
(So is there any need for codecs.open(), apart from backwards
compatibility?)

I've now updated library/functions.rst (change 59499) to reflect your
io.open() docs.

If you had the time you might want to check that I haven't said anything
untrue!

Unfortunately io.open() doesn't say what errors=None means. I hope it
means 'strict', but whatever it means, I'd like to specify the meaning
in the docs.

Thanks!

-- 
Mark Summerfield, Qtrac Ltd., www.qtrac.eu