Hi @reconman , thanks for your interest in Yamale!

We cannot change the encoding to UTF-8 without releasing a major version change since that may break existing users. We can to default it to the user's default locale instead. But before we look at doing that, I'd like to find a way to do this without a change to Yamale.

Have you tried to enable UTF-8 mode when running python? https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0540/

You can either use python -X uft8 or set the environment variable PYTHONUTF8=1.

Let me know if that works for your use case.

The project I'm maintaining is using Yamale as a library. Most of my users won't read the instructions and always miss the part where they have to set either of those.

I'd like to avoid that and directly set the encoding during the function call. When users clone my project, they already receive files with UTF-8 encoding and there are also some files provided by the community in UTF-8.

And it's easier to tell all users "use UTF-8 encoded YAML files" than to ask them if they're on Windows.

Thanks for outlining your use case. I agree setting the encoding in yamale will work best for you.

Since you're using Yamale as a library, would the following work for you?

import yamale

with open('./189.schema', 'r', encoding='utf-16') as f:
    schema = yamale.make_schema(content=f.read())

with open('./189.yaml', 'r', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    data = yamale.make_data(content=f.read())

yamale.validate(schema, data)

I'm trying to be careful about each additional parameter we add since it does increase the use cases we need to support.

Yes, that works. If you don't want to change Yamale, then you can close this issue.

I'm glad that solution works for you. Thanks!