unnecessary-encode-utf8 (UP012)

Derived from the pyupgrade linter.

Fix is always available.

What it does

Checks for unnecessary calls to encode as UTF-8.

Why is this bad?

UTF-8 is the default encoding in Python, so there is no need to call encode when UTF-8 is the desired encoding. Instead, use a bytes literal.

Example

"foo".encode("utf-8")

Use instead:

b"foo"

References

• Python documentation: str.encode