It actually depends! `bytes.decode` (and `str.encode`) have used UTF-8 as a default since at least Python 3. However, the default encoding used for decoding t

It actually depends! `bytes.decode` (and `str.encode`) have used UTF-8 as a default since at least Python 3. However, the default encoding used for decoding the name of files use ` sys.getfilesystemencoding()`, which is also UTF-8 on Windows and macos, but will vary with the locale on linux (specifically with CODESET). Finally, `open` will directly use `locale.getencoding()`.