flake8-encodings 0.3.1

A Flake8 plugin to identify incorrect use of encodings.

A Flake8 plugin to identify incorrect use of encodings.

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Installation

flake8-encodings can be installed from PyPI or Anaconda.

To install with pip:

$ python -m pip install flake8-encodings

To install with conda:

• First add the required channels

$ conda config --add channels http://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge
$ conda config --add channels http://conda.anaconda.org/domdfcoding

• Then install

$ conda install flake8-encodings

Motivation

Developers using macOS or Linux may forget that the default encoding is not always UTF-8.

For example, long_description = open("README.md").read() in setup.py is a common mistake. Many Windows users cannot install the package if there is at least one non-ASCII character (e.g. emoji) in the README.md file which is encoded in UTF-8.

For example, 489 packages of the 4000 most downloaded packages from PyPI used non-ASCII characters in README. And 82 packages of them cannot be installed from source package when the locale encoding is ASCII. [1] They used the default encoding to read README or TOML file.

Even Python experts assume that default encoding is UTF-8. It creates bugs that happen only on Windows. See [2], [3], [4], and [5] for example.

PEP 597 proposed adding a new EncodingWarning to Python, which can be used in conjunction with this tool to identify issues at runtime.

[1]

“Packages can’t be installed when encoding is not UTF-8” (https://github.com/methane/pep597-pypi-ascii)

[2]

Packaging tutorial in packaging.python.org didn’t specify encoding to read a README.md (https://github.com/pypa/packaging.python.org/pull/682)

[3]

json.tool had used locale encoding to read JSON files. (https://bugs.python.org/issue33684)

[4]

site: Potential UnicodeDecodeError when handling pth file (https://bugs.python.org/issue33684)

[5]

pypa/pip: “Installing packages fails if Python 3 installed into path with non-ASCII characters” (https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/9054)