Writing to a .txt file (UTF-8), python

Question

I want to save the output (contents) to a file (saving it in UTF-8). The file shouldn't be overwritten, it should be saved as a new file - e.g. file2.txt So, I fists open a file.txt, encode it in UTF-8, do some stuff and then wanna save it to file2.txt in UTF-8. How do I do this?

import codecs
def openfile(filename):
    with codecs.open(filename, encoding="UTF-8") as F:
        contents = F.read()
        ...

Answer 1

The short way:

file('file2.txt','w').write( file('file.txt').read().encode('utf-8') )

The long way:

data = file('file.txt').read()
... process data ...
data = data.encode('utf-8')
file('file2.txt','w').write( data )

And using 'codecs' explicitly:

codecs.getwriter('utf-8')(file('/tmp/bla3','w')).write(data)