The discussion is a nice overview how py3k crowd just steamrolls over any discussion that there are indeed inherent difficulties with forcing lossy conversion o

The discussion is a nice overview how py3k crowd just steamrolls over any discussion that there are indeed inherent difficulties with forcing lossy conversion of imperfect outside input. See example in the fine manual: https://docs.python.org/3.7/library/urllib.request.html#examples https://docs.python.org/3.7/library/urllib.request.html#exam... You are only told "we know python.org uses utf-8 so just decode it as utf-8." No further discussion, no pointers are provided how to correctly fetch an URL with text content into a string. Even small convenience function that at least tries to look on Content-Type: header would help here! I am well aware that "in py2k it just worked" was mostly an illusion. But honestly, is the situation above an improvement?