Re: [Docutils-develop] I/O uses default encoding argument

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

On 2022-06-09, Adam Turner wrote:

> Using Python 3.10's ``-X warn_default_encoding`` argument to Python, we
> can see a large number of places where the default encoding is used. On
> posix systems this is now UTF-8 following PEP 538 [1], but on Windows a
> non-unicode codepage can be used.

> The attached patch fixes the majority of these instances.

Thank you for the patch. After reading PEP 597, I agree that we should
specify the intended encoding where appropriate.

This means for every instance of open() without explicit encoding, we have
to decide whether to use "ascii", "utf-8", or `io.locale_encoding`
(the latter is equivalent to the value "locale" introduced in Py 3.10).

Unfortunately, the patch mixes added "encoding" arguments with the
change of "utf8" to "utf-8" in many cases.

* Is there a reason to prefer 'utf-8'?

  We have currently 36 instances of 'utf8' vs. 19 instances of 'utf-8'
  in the library code and tests.
  
  The "codecs" documentation names "utf8" and "utf-8" as aliases for "utf_8".
  
* Separating the encoding name normalization from new arguments would
  make it easier to check whether the new-specified encoding is correct.
  
Günter