odes the bytes according to PEP-0263 for determining source file encoding. It accepts a readline-like method which is called repeatedly to get the next line of input (or b"" for EOF). It generates 5-tuples with these members: the token type (see token.py) the token (a string) the starting (row, column) indices of the token (a 2-tuple of ints) the ending (row, column) indices of the token (a 2-tuple of ints) the original line (string) It is designed to match the working of the Python tokenizer exactly, except that it produces COMMENT tokens for comments and gives type OP for all operators. Additionally, all token lists start with an ENCODING token which tells you which encoding was used to decode the bytes stream. z