all Python 3codecsterm

encodings

module

The codec package: it holds the implementations of all built-in encodings found by str.encode, bytes.decode and open(encoding=...).

Syntax

import encodings

encodings is rarely imported directly: it stores codecs such as encodings.utf_8 and encodings.cp1251, while the codecs module and the built-in encode/decode do the work. Submodules with special behaviour are encodings.idna for domain names and encodings.utf_8_sig, which strips the BOM. Encoding names are normalised, so 'UTF-8', 'utf8' and 'utf_8' are one codec.

Examples

import encodings, codecs
print(encodings.normalize_encoding('UTF-8 sig'))  # → UTF_8_sig
print(codecs.lookup('utf8').name)  # → utf-8
print('я'.encode('utf_8_sig'))  # → b'\xef\xbb\xbf\xd1\x8f'

See also

Common errors

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