flake8-file-encoding

flake8-file-encoding

A Flake8 plugin to check for files opened without an explicit encoding.

Why check for encoding arguments?

If you don't specify an encoding argument to the open function, then Python will use a platform-dependent default encoding—whatever locale.getpreferredencoding returns. On many platforms this is UTF-8, but on a significant minority it is something different. For example, the default encoding on Japanese Windows machines is cp932 (Microsoft's version of Shift-JIS). If you open a UTF-8 file on such a system but do not specify an encoding, then attempting to read any multi-byte characters in the file will cause a UnicodeDecodeError.

Installation

pip install flake8-file-encoding

Usage

Once this plugin is installed, Flake8 will check for missing encoding arguments along with its other checks. No special activation for this plugin is necessary. For more details on running Flake8, see the Flake8 documentation.

Errors

Code	Message
FEN001	open() call has no encoding argument