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Python Regular Expressions in Python Introduction to Regular Expressions Reading Files

Stheven Cabral
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Stheven Cabral
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Graduate 29,854 Points
Posted by Stheven Cabral
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Stheven Cabral
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Graduate 29,854 Points

What Does UTF-8 mean?

In the Reading Files video, Kenneth uses the code:

names_file = open("names.txt", encoding="utf-8")

What does the encoding="utf-8" do?

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,275 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,275 Points

UTF-8 is an abbreviation of *8-bit Unicode Transformation Format", a common scheme used for representing characters including letters, numbers, and both standard and special symbols.

Setting "encoding" to this value tells the system what to expect the file contents to be like. For more details on how Python handles character representation, see the codecs portion of the Python reference manual.