"JEP 400: UTF-8 by Default" and future of Python

[methane (Inada Naoki)]

@EpicWink

@methane

I think changing the default encoding will fix more programs than it breaks. But I want to see more wide area of Python OSS.

What do you mean by this? How would the community know if changing the default would break things without actually changing the default?

We provide EncodingWarning since Python 3.10. Pylint also provide warning too.

Some Python users including me start fixing them. How we fix them can be used to estimate how changing the default encoding will fix or break existing code.

If we fix it by adding encoding="utf-8", changing the default encoding also fix the (potential) bugs.
If we fix it by adding encoding="locale" or encoding=locale.getpreferredencoding(False), changing the default encoding will break such code.

I will gather that information. If you interesting it, this is incomplete list:

• Pull requests · python/cpython · GitHub
• Use UTF-8 encoding for log file. by methane · Pull Request #10072 · pypa/pip · GitHub
• Fix EncodingWarning by methane · Pull Request #134 · python/pyperformance · GitHub
• Issue search results · GitHub