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

[Adam T. <aat...@ou...>]

> 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).

My strong suggestion would be that Docutils moves towards defaulting to UTF-8 for all encodings (of course keeping the option to supply explicit other encodings) -- it is compatible with US-ASCII and is the safest sane default. (PEP 686's motivation section [1]_ has some colour on this).

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

An updated patch attached (The only 'utf8' -> 'utf-8' were in the LaTex2e writer, but you're right it is better to keep the changes distinct.)

A

_[1]: https://peps.python.org/pep-0686/#motivation