Pyyaml: yaml.load does not support encodings different from current system encoding, cannot you add it?

[Felix-neko]

Hi folks!

We try to use PyYaml in Windows with UTF-8 yaml files. Alas, yaml.load raises an error: it does not support encoding different from system one (in Windows it is CP-1251). Can you add such a feature to manually set the encoding in which the yaml file is?

The traceback, if needed:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:/Projects/bricks2/main.py", line 45, in <module>
    main_wnd.load_components()
  File "D:\Projects\bricks2\bricks\gui\main_wnd.py", line 286, in load_components
    self.registry.load()
  File "D:\Projects\bricks_cli\bricks_cli\registry.py", line 38, in load
    self._load_config(root_node, config)
  File "D:\Projects\bricks_cli\bricks_cli\registry.py", line 44, in _load_config
    config_obj = yaml.load(open(config, 'r'))
  File "C:\Python35\lib\site-packages\yaml\__init__.py", line 73, in load
    loader = Loader(stream)
  File "C:\Python35\lib\site-packages\yaml\loader.py", line 24, in __init__
    Reader.__init__(self, stream)
  File "C:\Python35\lib\site-packages\yaml\reader.py", line 85, in __init__
    self.determine_encoding()
  File "C:\Python35\lib\site-packages\yaml\reader.py", line 124, in determine_encoding
    self.update_raw()
  File "C:\Python35\lib\site-packages\yaml\reader.py", line 178, in update_raw
    data = self.stream.read(size)
  File "C:\Python35\lib\encodings\cp1251.py", line 23, in decode
    return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x98 in position 2574: character maps to <undefined>

[TormodLandet]

The yaml.load() method takes an open file object. You must set the encoding when you open the file. This does not have anything to do with PyYAML. Your code contains

config_obj = yaml.load(open(config, 'r'))

I would suggest to change this to

with open(config, 'rt', encoding='utf8') as yml:
    config_obj = yaml.load(yml)

PS: I did not test this code, but it (or something close to it) should work on Python3. If you are still on python2 you can import codecs and use codecs.open.

I suggest to close this issue

[aliceinwire]

rt mode are not needed explicitly as they are the default options.
https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#open

[perlpunk]

@Felix-neko if your question is not answered by @TormodLandet then please reopen.