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I want to write one or more self-answered Q&As on the topic of text encoding in Python, to serve as canonicals and preempt future lower-quality questions. I can think of the following things th...
#1: Initial revision
by
Karl Knechtel
·
2023-08-29T19:07:16Z (8 months ago)
How should I organize material about text encoding in Python into questions?
I want to write one or more self-answered Q&As on the topic of text encoding in Python, to serve as canonicals and preempt future lower-quality questions. I can think of the following things that need to be addressed: * What is *an encoding*? * What are *encoding* (the process) and *decoding*? How do I know which is which? * Why do I need a text encoding? *When* do I need one? * How can I know which text encoding to use? * How can I know *if/how much freedom I have* in choosing a text encoding? * Are encodings used for other things? Why? * How do I specify an encoding... * for converting bytes to a string or vice-versa? * for reading and writing files? * when working with web libraries such as Requests, BeautifulSoup etc.? * when using a library to parse formats like CSV, JSON etc.? * What is the `codecs` standard library module for, and how does it relate to text encoding? * What are `UnicodeEncodeError` and `UnicodeDecodeError`? What do they mean; what causes them; and how do I resolve them? * Historical: in Python 2.x, why can attempts to decode cause `UnicodeEncodeError`, and vice-versa? * Historical / migration: how should I understand the type names `bytes`, `str` and `unicode` in 2.x vs 3.x? * Historical: What was `basestring` in 2.x and why was it needed? * Historical / migration: why did 2.x treat those types the way it did, and why does 3.x treat them differently? Why shouldn't I try to emulate the old approaches in new code? There might be more that I'm forgetting. My question here is, *how should I organize* these facets of the topic into questions? I don't think all of this material can be covered in a single post, but making things too fine-grained makes things awkward in the future - it becomes too hard to search for the right question because you find the other ones instead, and the material becomes redundant between questions.