PEP 686 – Make UTF-8 mode default

Default text file encoding being platform-dependent always drove me nuts. This is a welcome change.

I also appreciate that they did not attempt to tackle filesystem encoding here, which is a separate issue that drives me nuts, but separately.

Historically it made sense, when most software was local-only, and text files were expected to be in the local encoding. Not just platform-dependent, but user’s preferred locale-dependent. This is also how the C standard library operates.

For example, on Unix/Linux, using iso-8859-1 was common when using Western-European languages, and in Europe it became common to switch to iso-8859-15 after the Euro was introduced, because it contained the € symbol. UTF-8 only began to work flawlessly in the later aughts. Debian switched to it as the default with the Etch release in 2010.