Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

The importlib.resources functions {open,read}_{text,binary}, path, is_resource and contents, deprecated in 3.11 and removed in 3.13 alphas, are, anecdotally, missed by quite a few users.
They provide a simple API for simple tasks, while the full-featured Traversable API is better suited for complex ones -- especially for implementing new resources-aware loaders.

I'm now in a position where I can add these functions back and support them.

Their main drawback -- not allowing subdirectories -- can be solved by taking multiple path components as positional arguments, for example:

importlib.resources.read_text('modulename', 'subdirectory', 'subsubdir', 'resource.txt')

The additional arguments (encoding and errors) would become keyword-only.

There is a wrinkle in this: in Python 3.9-3.11, the above would mean:

importlib.resources.read_text(
    'modulename', 'subdirectory',
    encoding='subsubdir',
    errors='resource.txt',
)

I believe that this is acceptable, since:

• pragmatically: typical file names do not match typical encoding/errorhandler names
• lawyerly: the functions have already been deprecated for 2 releases; no one is using them now, right?

However, if this is a problem, I can

[edit: This is solved by:]

• make the encoding argument required if a text-reading function more than one path component is given.
• plan to lift this limitation around 3.15.

importlib.resources.read_text(
    'modulename', 'subdirectory', 'subsubdir', 'resource.txt',
    encoding='utf-8',
)
importlib.resources.read_text('modulename', 'resource.txt')  # OK
importlib.resources.read_text('modulename', 'subdirectory', 'utf-8')  # error

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

I have already discussed this feature proposal on Discourse

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

https://discuss.python.org/t/deprecating-importlib-resources-legacy-api/11386/29

Linked PRs

• gh-116608: Bring back importlib.resources functional API #116609
• gh-116608: Ignore UTF-16 BOM in importlib.resources._functional tests #117569
• gh-116608: Apply style and compatibility changes from importlib_metadata. #123028
• [3.13] gh-116608: Apply style and compatibility changes from importlib_resources. (GH-123028) #123051
• [3.13] gh-116608: Revert "[3.13] gh-116608: Apply style and compatibility changes from importlib_resources. (GH-123028) (#123051)" #123072
• [3.13] gh-116608: Re-apply style and compatibility changes from importlib_resources. (GH-123028) #123074
• [3.12] gh-116608: undeprecate functional importlib.resources API #132206