Where does that filepath come from? A config file; are you going to do your text processing, and interaction, with other modules in byte[] arrays in Python 3+?

Where does that filepath come from? A config file; are you going to do your text processing, and interaction, with other modules in byte[] arrays in Python 3+? Python 2's unicode model was _closer_ to correct, the trivial coercion between byte[] and Unicode. Conversion also shouldn't imply, force, or check Validation nor Normalization. Labeling a bytestream with an Encoding and validating / normalizing that encoding should be options. Operations on bytestreams with encoding related attributes should set them to either 'unknown' result or to a proper output type if they're aware the manipulations will still yield a valid encoding. Normalization is more complex, since Unicode strings can be normalized in different ways, then combined, and still be a valid string but no longer uniformly normalized.