tokenize.detect_encoding()

tokenize.detect_encoding(readline)

The detect_encoding() function is used to detect the encoding that should be used to decode a Python source file. It requires one argument, readline, in the same way as the tokenize() generator.

It will call readline a maximum of twice, and return the encoding used (as a string) and a list of any lines (not decoded from bytes) it has read in.

It detects the encoding from the presence of a UTF-8 BOM or an encoding cookie as specified in PEP 263. If both a BOM and a cookie are present, but disagree, a SyntaxError will be raised. Note that if the BOM is found, 'utf-8-sig' will be returned as an encoding.

If no encoding is specified, then the default of 'utf-8' will be returned.

Use open() to open Python source files: it uses detect_encoding() to detect the file encoding.