On Wed, Mar 4, 2015, at 07:12, Albert-Jan Roskam wrote: > Hi, > > Is there a (use case) difference between codecs.open and io.open? What is > the difference? > A small difference that I just discovered is that > codecs.open(somefile).read() returns a bytestring if no encoding is > specified*), but a unicode string if an encoding is specified. io.open > always returns a unicode string.
I think this is a historical accident. Originally, in python 2, built-in open only returned byte strings. Later, codecs was added, and then io was added after that. Python 3 changed the built-in functions to use the same classes as io, and now io.open and built-in open are the same. In new Python 3 code, you should probably always use builtin open. Use binary mode (mode option has "b" in it) if you want byte strings. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
