python - Reading all kinds of files in different encodings

Question

I built a Python steganographer that hides UTF-8 text in images and it works fine for it. I was wondering if I could encode complete files in images. For this, the program needs to read all kinds of files. The problem is that not all files are encoded with UTF-8 and therefore, you have to read them with:

file = open('somefile.docx', encoding='utf-8', errors='surrogateescape')

and if you copy it to a new file and read them then it says that the files are not decipherable. I need a way to read all kinds of files and later write them so that they still work. Do you have a way to do this in Python 3?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Change your view. You don't "hide UTF-8 text in images". You hide bytes in images.

These bytes could be - purely accidentally - interpretable as UTF-8-encoded text. But in reality they could be anything.

Reading a file as text with open("...", encoding="...") has the hidden step of decoding the bytes of the file into string. This is convenient when you want to treat the file contents as string in your program.

Skip that hidden decoding step and read the file as bytes: open("...", "rb").