# Add legacy\_text\_encoding option to make UTF-8 default

**URL:** <https://discuss.python.org/t/add-legacy-text-encoding-option-to-make-utf-8-default/14281>\
**Category:** Ideas\
**Created:** [March 15, 2022, 7:08am UTC](https://discuss.python.org/t/add-legacy-text-encoding-option-to-make-utf-8-default/14281 "2022-03-15T07:08:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![methane](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/discuss.python.org/methane/32/43_2.png) [@methane](https://discuss.python.org/u/methane)\
**Post date:** [March 18, 2022, 11:03am UTC](https://discuss.python.org/t/add-legacy-text-encoding-option-to-make-utf-8-default/14281/7 "2022-03-18T11:03:34Z")

</div>

Now I wrote PEP 686. It uses UTF-8 mode, instead of adding yet another option.

> [@PEP 686: Make UTF-8 mode default](https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-686-make-utf-8-mode-default/14435):
>
> [Abstract](#abstract) This PEP proposes making UTF-8 mode [[1]](#id7) on by default. With this change, Python uses UTF-8 for default encoding of files, stdio, and pipes consistently. [Motivation](#motivation) UTF-8 becomes de-facto standard text encoding. Default encoding of Python source files is UTF-8. JSON, TOML, YAML uses UTF-8. Most text editors including VS Code and Windows notepad use UTF-8 by default. Most websites and text data on the internet uses UTF-8. And many other popular programming languages including node…

---

_[View the full topic](https://discuss.python.org/t/add-legacy-text-encoding-option-to-make-utf-8-default/14281)._