Handling CSV Character Encoding, Dates, and Numbers Correctly: A Practical Introduction to Python

When you start working with CSVs in Python, almost everyone hits the same wall. It looks garbled when opened in Excel. Dates remain as strings and cannot be calculated. You get an error when trying to ...

Python 3.15 defaults to UTF-8 for character encoding. Changes on Windows

On October 9, 2026, Python 3.15.0 was released. When opening a file with open() without specifying a character encoding, it ...
Linux Journal

Bytes, Characters and Python 2

Moving from Python 2 to 3? Here's what you need to know about strings and their role in in your upgrade. An old joke asks "What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. Two ...
LWN.net

The kernel and character set encodings

If Unicode is a horde of zombies with flaming dung sticks, the hideous intricacies of JIS, Chinese Big-5, Chinese Traditional, KOI-8, et cetera are at least an army of ogres with salt and flensing ...