https://community.esri.com/t5/python-questions/psa-for-those-of-you-using-pathlib-for-file/m-p/1639736#M74581 <P>I was just banging my head against a wall for a couple hours trying to figure out why all my text was being written back into my project using&nbsp;cp1252 encoding. Turns out that if you use the Path.open() method to read a file, it will defer to your system for text encoding. In the case of Windows, that is still cp1252 and not utf-8 even though all userspace text in Windows has been utf-8 for a few years. This was a nefarious bug since ASCII, cp1252, and UTF-8 are all interchangeable for English letters and punctuation. it wasn't until a field contained the&nbsp;• symbol and I got back&nbsp;• that I noticed.&nbsp;</P><P>Fix:</P><LI-CODE lang="python">-- Path('&lt;filepath&gt;').open('wt').write(my_string) ++ Path('&lt;filepath&gt;').open('wt', encoding='utf-8').write(my_string)</LI-CODE><P>&nbsp;</P><P>Note:</P><P>Files will remember the encoding they were created in, so make sure you don't have any files containing unicode that are actually encoded as&nbsp;cp1252 or you'll be kicking yourself.</P><P>&nbsp;</P> Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:50:18 GMT HaydenWelch 2025-08-06T16:50:18Z https://community.esri.com/t5/python-questions/psa-for-those-of-you-using-pathlib-for-file/m-p/1639736#M74581 <P>I was just banging my head against a wall for a couple hours trying to figure out why all my text was being written back into my project using&nbsp;cp1252 encoding. Turns out that if you use the Path.open() method to read a file, it will defer to your system for text encoding. In the case of Windows, that is still cp1252 and not utf-8 even though all userspace text in Windows has been utf-8 for a few years. This was a nefarious bug since ASCII, cp1252, and UTF-8 are all interchangeable for English letters and punctuation. it wasn't until a field contained the&nbsp;• symbol and I got back&nbsp;• that I noticed.&nbsp;</P><P>Fix:</P><LI-CODE lang="python">-- Path('&lt;filepath&gt;').open('wt').write(my_string) ++ Path('&lt;filepath&gt;').open('wt', encoding='utf-8').write(my_string)</LI-CODE><P>&nbsp;</P><P>Note:</P><P>Files will remember the encoding they were created in, so make sure you don't have any files containing unicode that are actually encoded as&nbsp;cp1252 or you'll be kicking yourself.</P><P>&nbsp;</P> Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:50:18 GMT https://community.esri.com/t5/python-questions/psa-for-those-of-you-using-pathlib-for-file/m-p/1639736#M74581 HaydenWelch 2025-08-06T16:50:18Z