Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How it works...

Once the encoding option is passed to open, the resulting object file will know that any string provided to file.write must be encoded to the specified encoding before storing the actual bytes into the file. This is also true for file.read(), which will fetch the bytes from the file and decode them with the specified encoding before returning them to you.

This allows you to read/write content in files with any encoding independently from the one that your system declares as the favorite one.