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

On 8/08/26 4:33 pm, Veek M wrote:
> it's the raw utf-8 encoded as bytes but since it is a unicode string why
> doesn't he save it as u'\xef\xbf\xbf' why does he escape the '\' and make
> it '\\x'

Because you decoded it as ascii with backslashreplace. It's replacing 
each byte that's outside the ascii range with four characters: a 
backslash, an 'x', and two hex digits. The backslashes are being doubled 
when you print the string and its repr() gets computed.

Since the file is actually utf-8 and not ascii, that's the appropriate 
way to decode it:

   fh = open('/tmp/x', 'rt', encoding = 'utf-8')

Then your ffff should come through as a single character in the string 
and print as '\uffff'.

-- 
Greg