flake8-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 https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge
$ conda config --add channels https://conda.anaconda.org/domdfcoding

• Then install

$ conda install flake8-encodings

In version 0.5.1 and above the functionality for checking classes (configparser.ConfigParser and pathlib.Path for now) requires the classes extra to be installed:

$ python3 -m pip install flake8-encodings[classes]

The checks for classes are slower and CPU intensive, so only enable them if you use the classes in question.

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.