Re: open: 'ascii', 'backslashreplace' not behaving as expected - why?

Veek M <[email protected]>
Newsgroups comp.lang.python
Organization A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID <[email protected]> 
On Sat, 8 Aug 2026 01:19:32 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:

> b'\xef\xbf\xbf\n'.decode()

Could you explain how it works and what exactly is going on?

fh.readline() returns a unicode string with the funny chars (bytes 0xff 
0xff) encoded as \\xef \\xbf \\xbf - why is it \\? why not just use a 
single u'\xef\xbf\xbf' - why is he escaping the '\'.

Also - how exactly is he getting ef bf bf and not ff ff?
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