On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 9:56 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote: > One of the principal UNIX innovations was to see files as simple byte > sequences. The operating system would place no semantics on the meaning > or structure of the bytes.
And you also want to see those files as containing "plain text", right? Unfortunately, those two goals are in conflict. Either a file is nothing but bytes, or it contains text in some encoding. From the file system and operating system's points of view, the files are indeed nothing but bytes; but from the application's point of view, text is text and bytes is bytes. In Python, a text file is opened with a specific encoding, and Python handles the encode/decode steps. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
