<s>[INST] Write to UTF-8 file in Python I'm really confused with the codecs.open function. When I do:
file = codecs.open("temp", "w", "utf-8")
file.write(codecs.BOM_UTF8)
file.close()

It gives me the error

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position
  0: ordinal not in range(128)

If I do:
file = open("temp", "w")
file.write(codecs.BOM_UTF8)
file.close()

It works fine.
Question is why does the first method fail? And how do I insert the bom?
If the second method is the correct way of doing it, what the point of using codecs.open(filename, "w", "utf-8")?
 [/INST] Disclaimer: I'm not a Python programmer.
I believe the problem is that codecs.BOM_UTF8 is a byte string, not a Unicode string. I suspect the file handler is trying to guess what you really mean based on "I'm meant to be writing Unicode as UTF-8-encoded text, but you've given me a byte string!"
Try writing the Unicode string for the byte order mark (i.e. Unicode U+FEFF) directly, so that the file just encodes that as UTF-8:
import codecs

file = codecs.open("lol", "w", "utf-8")
file.write(u'\ufeff')
file.close()

(That seems to give the right answer - a file with bytes EF BB BF.)
EDIT: S. Lott's suggestion of using "utf-8-sig" as the encoding is a better one than explicitly writing the BOM yourself, but I'll leave this answer here as it explains what was going wrong before.
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