Hmm, interesting. Thanks for opening this issue and even including a fix PR. I do have one question though, could this cause issues in reverse? In other words, if we hardcode encoding="utf-8", could we run into decoding errors if we try to open a file that's been encoded as cp1252? Sorry, I'm not too familiar with how this works on Windows.

Would another solution here be to use UTF-8 mode? In other words you could run python with the -X utf8 flag, or set PYTHONUTF8=1 when running cohesion.

Hi, it's possible, but since UTF-8 is the default encoding for Python code, it'd be a more sane default, instead of relying on the filesystem.
Python does support using a different encoding if it's specified in the first or second line of the file, I'm not really sure if anyone uses that, but it does offer the possibility of detecting that comment and switching the encoding automatically, to avoid such possible errors.
I'll look into that and update the PR accordingly.

Looking into it further, ast.parse() seems to accept bytes as well as str, and respects the encoding comment. We can just return bytes from get_file_contents and let the parser figure it out. I think that'd be the best solution right now, unless it's necessary for get_file_contents to only ever return str.

I updated the PR in the case that's satisfactory. Thanks