`open()` built-in function: let it have `encoding="utf-8"` and `newline="\n"` by default

[PedanticHacker]

This is the signature of the open() built-in function:

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

Proposal number 1

Since Python universally migrated to the UTF-8 character encoding a long time ago, set the encoding parameter of the open() built-in function to default to encoding="utf-8".

Proposal number 2

Because the Windows operating system also handles \n as a newline character since practically forever, set newline="\n" as a default parameter of the open() built-in function.

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

[hugovk]

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Thanks for the proposal, I think this is a good topic to discuss in the Ideas forum first, especially as it touches on backwards compatibility.

Please could you open a thread at https://discuss.python.org/c/ideas/6 ?

[ZeroIntensity]

No need to go to DPO, the PEP about it was already accepted: PEP-686

It's not due until next year, though.

[hugovk]

Thanks, I thought it sounded familiar :)

Let's close this then.

[PedanticHacker]

What about the newline parameter of the open() built-in function being ”\n” by default?

[hugovk]

Please open an Ideas topic for newline :)

[PedanticHacker]

Since we will be defaulting to "utf-8" (to replace current None) for the encoding parameter of the open() built-in function, we must change the default value of the ensure_ascii parameter of the json.dump() and json.dumps() functions to be False by default (currently, this value is True by default).

[PedanticHacker]

Will ensure_ascii of dump() and dumps() methods from the json module be changed to finally be False by default? This value is currently True by default, so if you wanted UTF-8, but forgot to set ensure_ascii=False, you were f*cked!

Oh how many times I got burned, because I forgot to set this to False to get non-escaped UTF-8 characters! Why is this even enforced? Who in this day and age uses ASCII anyway?