如何在Python-3.x中解码文件？

Question

For my project I need to parse xml file. For doing this I use lxml. The file I need to parse has a cp1251 coding, but, ofcourse, for parsing it using lxml I need to decode it into utf-8, and I dont know how to do it. I tryed to serch something about this, but all solutions was for Python 2.7 or didnt work. if try to write something like

inp = open("business.xml", "r", encoding='cp1251').decode('utf-8')

or

inp.decode('utf-8')

It gets

builtins.AttributeError: '_io.TextIOWrapper' object has no attribute 'decode'

I have Python 3.2. Any help is well, thanks you.

Answer 1

open() decodes the file for you . You are already receiving Unicode data.

For lxml you need to open the file in binary mode, and let the XML parser deal with encoding. Do not do this yourself.

with open("business.xml", "rb") as inp:
    tree = etree.parse(inp)

XML files include a header to indicate what encoding they use, and the parser adjusts to that. If the header is missing, the parser can safely assume UTF-8.