Python in a Nutshell

Name

open

Synopsis

open(filename,mode='rb',encoding=None,errors=’strict',
     buffering=1)

Uses the built-in function open (covered in Chapter 10) to supply a file-like object that accepts and/or provides Unicode strings to/from Python client code, while the underlying file can either be in Unicode (when encoding is None) or use the codec named by encoding. For example, if you want to write Unicode strings to file uni.txt and have the strings implicitly encoded as latin-1 in the file, replacing with '?' any character that cannot be encoded in Latin-1, use the following:

import codecs
flout = codecs.open('uni.txt','w','latin-1','replace')

# now you can write Unicode strings directly to flout
flout.write(u'élève')
flout.close( )