diff --git a/Lib/pydoc.py b/Lib/pydoc.py
index 2533226..aa4b6d5 100755
--- a/Lib/pydoc.py
+++ b/Lib/pydoc.py
@@ -2580,7 +2580,7 @@
     def html_getfile(path):
         """Get and display a source file listing safely."""
         path = path.replace('%20', ' ')
-        with open(path, 'r') as fp:
+        with tokenize.open(path) as fp:
             lines = html.escape(fp.read())
         body = '<pre>%s</pre>' % lines
         heading = html.heading(
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index ae0ed58..0bc7cd7 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -27,6 +27,10 @@
 - Issue #12467: warnings: fix a race condition if a warning is emitted at
   shutdown, if globals()['__file__'] is None.
 
+- Issue #12451: pydoc: html_getfile() now uses tokenize.open() to support
+  Python scripts using a encoding different than UTF-8 (read the coding cookie
+  of the script).
+
 - Issue #12451: pydoc: importfile() now opens the Python script in binary mode,
   instead of text mode using the locale encoding, to avoid encoding issues.