Marc-Andre Lemburg <mal@lemburg.com>:
Made codecs.open() default to 'rb' as file mode.
diff --git a/Lib/codecs.py b/Lib/codecs.py
index 1a71fab..fbb9824 100644
--- a/Lib/codecs.py
+++ b/Lib/codecs.py
@@ -458,7 +458,7 @@
### Shortcuts
-def open(filename, mode, encoding=None, errors='strict', buffering=1):
+def open(filename, mode='rb', encoding=None, errors='strict', buffering=1):
""" Open an encoded file using the given mode and return
a wrapped version providing transparent encoding/decoding.
@@ -468,6 +468,11 @@
codecs. Output is also codec dependent and will usually by
Unicode as well.
+ Files are always opened in binary mode, even if no binary mode
+ was specified. Thisis done to avoid data loss due to encodings
+ using 8-bit values. The default file mode is 'rb' meaning to
+ open the file in binary read mode.
+
encoding specifies the encoding which is to be used for the
the file.