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# Module: `utils.encoding`

Utilities for dealing with text encodings

## 2 Functions

`IPython.utils.encoding.``get_stream_enc`(stream, default=None)

  Return the given stream’s encoding or a default.

  There are cases where `sys.std*` might not actually be a stream, so check for the encoding attribute prior to returning it, and return a default if it doesn’t exist or evaluates as False. `default` is None if not provided.

`IPython.utils.encoding.``getdefaultencoding`(prefer_stream=True)

  Return IPython’s guess for the default encoding for bytes as text.

  If prefer_stream is True (default), asks for stdin.encoding first, to match the calling Terminal, but that is often None for subprocesses.

  Then fall back on locale.getpreferredencoding(), which should be a sensible platform default (that respects LANG environment), and finally to sys.getdefaultencoding() which is the most conservative option, and usually ASCII on Python 2 or UTF8 on Python 3.

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