Unicode (UTF-8) reading and writing to files in Python

Question

I\'m having some brain failure in understanding reading and writing text to a file (Python 2.4).

# The string, which has an a-acute in it.
ss = u\'Capit\\xe1         


        

Answer 1

Now all you need in Python3 is open(Filename, 'r', encoding='utf-8')

[Edit on 2016-02-10 for requested clarification]

Python3 added the encoding parameter to its open function. The following information about the open function is gathered from here: https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#open

open(file, mode='r', buffering=-1, 
      encoding=None, errors=None, newline=None, 
      closefd=True, opener=None)

Encoding is the name of the encoding used to decode or encode the file. This should only be used in text mode. The default encoding is platform dependent (whatever locale.getpreferredencoding() returns), but any text encoding supported by Python can be used. See the codecs module for the list of supported encodings.

So by adding encoding='utf-8' as a parameter to the open function, the file reading and writing is all done as utf8 (which is also now the default encoding of everything done in Python.)