1. To get an encoding parameter in Python 2:
If you only need to support Python 2.6 and 2.7 you can use io.open instead of open. io is the new io subsystem for Python 3, and it exists in Python 2,6 ans 2.7 as well. Please be aware that in Python 2.6 (as well as 3.0) it's implemented purely in python and very slow, so if you need speed in reading files, it's not a good option.
If you need speed, and you need to support Python 2.6 or earlier, you can use codecs.open instead. It also has an encoding parameter, and is quite similar to io.open except it handles line-endings differently.
2. To get a Python 3 open() style file handler which streams bytestrings:
open(filename, 'rb')
Note the 'b', meaning 'binary'.
Answer from Lennart Regebro on Stack OverflowWhen working with files, I sometimes run into UnicodeDecodeError. Apparently this is because not all unicode characters can be converted into strings, and I saw that some people solved this by adding encoding="utf-8" as a parameter, but have anyone got an idea on what this does?
1. To get an encoding parameter in Python 2:
If you only need to support Python 2.6 and 2.7 you can use io.open instead of open. io is the new io subsystem for Python 3, and it exists in Python 2,6 ans 2.7 as well. Please be aware that in Python 2.6 (as well as 3.0) it's implemented purely in python and very slow, so if you need speed in reading files, it's not a good option.
If you need speed, and you need to support Python 2.6 or earlier, you can use codecs.open instead. It also has an encoding parameter, and is quite similar to io.open except it handles line-endings differently.
2. To get a Python 3 open() style file handler which streams bytestrings:
open(filename, 'rb')
Note the 'b', meaning 'binary'.
I think
from io import open
should do.