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When passed unicode strings, difflib.HtmlDiff.make_file and make_table 
fail with a UnicodeEncodeError. Also, the html outputted by make_file 
seems to be hardcoded to use charset=ISO-8859-1 (line 1584 of difflib.py)

Oops, please close this. Apparently was fixed in 2.5.1, and I'm just 
behind.

After installing 2.5.1, the UnicodeEncodeError is gone, but the charset is 
still hardcoded in difflib._file_template. So, I guess this is still a 
separate bug.

difflib._file_template is still hard-coded in py3k SVN. I'm unsure as to whether this is a feature request, a behaviour issue or not an issue at all, can someone please advise, thanks.

I believe that charset is the standard default for html, which would make this a feature request.

In 3.2, it is line 1629:
 content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
That charset was only standard for Western European documents limited to that charset. Now, even such limited-char docs often use 'utf-8' (python.org does). The result of putting an incorrect charset designation in an html file is that the browser will not display the file correctly.
For instance, I tried an input sequence containing line 'c\u3333', which displays in IDLE as 'cフィート'. The string from HtmlDill.make_file() must be written to a file opened with encoding='utf-8', not the above or equivalent. Firefox then reads the three bytes of the utf-8 encoding as three separate characters and displays 'cãŒ3'. To check:
>>> 'cフィート'.encode().decode(encoding='Latin-1')
'cã\x8c3'
To me the clear implication of "returns a string which is a complete HTML file containing a table showing line by line differences with inter-line and intra-line changes highlighted." is that the resulting file will display correctly. The current template charset prevents that, changing to 'utf-8' results in a file that displays correctly (tested). So the current behavior and the code that causes it is to me clearly a bug. I would like to fix it before 2.7.4 comes out.

After thinking about it more, the real problem is that the charset setting must match the chars used and how they re encoded, so no one setting is right for all uses. An alternative to changing the default in existing versions is to at least document what it is and explain how to work around it with .replace -- for instance output.replace('ISO-8859-1', 'utf-8'). I agree that adding a parameter (charset=xxx) is a new feature.

I haven't looked at the code, but if an HTML page is generated it should probably be updated to use HTML5 and <meta charset="utf-8">.

Attaching two patches:
issue2052.diff adds a "charset" keyword argument to HtmlDiff.make_file().
issue2052_html5.diff also adds a "charset" keyword argument to HtmlDiff.make_file() and updates the markup of HtmlDiff() to HTML5. I tested it with Firefox 29 and Chrome 34.

Attaching a new version of issue2052_html5.diff. Changes:
- Switch from px to em in CSS
- Cleanup markup a bit (e.g. delete redundant colgroup tags)

May be updating the markup to HTML5 should be different issue. issue2052_html5_v2.diff not only adds charset in HTML5 format, it totally changes the template. This definitely a separate issue.

Here is an updated patch. Thanks for the review, Serhiy. I will open a new issue for the HTML 5 part of the patch.

LGTM

New changeset e058423d3ca4 by Berker Peksag in branch 'default':
Issue #2052: Add charset parameter to HtmlDiff.make_file().
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/e058423d3ca4 

Thanks Serhiy.