We Keep Coding

'UCS-2' codec can't encode characters in position 61-61

When I run my Python code and print(item), I get the following errors:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'UCS-2' codec can't encode characters in position 61-61: Non-BMP character not supported in Tk
Here is my code:
def getUserFollowers(self, usernameId, maxid = ''):
if maxid == '':
return self.SendRequest('friendships/'+ str(usernameId) +'/followers/?rank_token='+ self.rank_token,l=2)
else:
return self.SendRequest('friendships/'+ str(usernameId) +'/followers/?rank_token='+ self.rank_token + '&max_id='+ str(maxid))
def getTotalFollowers(self,usernameId):
followers = []
next_max_id = ''
while 1:
self.getUserFollowers(usernameId,next_max_id)
temp = self.LastJson
for item in temp["users"]:
print(item)
followers.append(item)
if temp["big_list"] == False:
return followers
next_max_id = temp["next_max_id"]
How can I fix this?

Hard to guess without knowing the content of temp["users"], but the error indicates that it contains non BMP unicode characters like for example emoji.
If you try to display that in IDLE, you immediately get that kind of error. Simple example to reproduce (on IDLE for Python 3.5):
>>> t = "ab \U0001F600 cd"
>>> print(t)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#5>", line 1, in <module>
print(t)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'UCS-2' codec can't encode characters in position 3-3: Non-BMP character not supported in Tk
(\U0001F600 represents the unicode character U+1F600 grinning face)
The error is indeed caused by Tk not supporting unicode characters with code greater than FFFF. A simple workaround is the filter them out of your string:
def BMP(s):
return "".join((i if ord(i) < 10000 else '\ufffd' for i in s))
'\ufffd' is the Python representation for the unicode U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER.
My example becomes:
>>> t = "ab \U0001F600 cd"
>>> print(BMP(t))
ab � cd
So your code would become:
for item in temp["users"]:
print(BMP(item))
followers.append(item)

Dictionary keys cannot be encoded as utf-8

I am using the twitter streaming api (tweepy) to capture several tweets. I do this in python2.7.
After I have collected a corpus of tweets I break each tweet into words and add each word to a dictionary as keys, where the values are the participation of each word in positive or negative sentences.
When I retrieve the words as keys of the dictionary and try to process them for a next iteration I get
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)
errors
The weird thing is that before I place them as dictionary keys I encode them without errors. Here is a sample code
pos = {}
neg = {}
for status in corpus:
p = s.analyze(status).polarity
words = []
# gather real words
for w in status.split(' '):
try:
words.append(w.encode('utf-8'))
except UnicodeDecodeError as e:
print(e)
# assign sentiment of the sentence to the words
for w in words:
if w not in pos:
pos[w] = 0
neg[w] = 0
if p >= 0:
pos[w] += 1
else:
neg[w] += 1
k = pos.keys()
k = [i.encode('utf-8') for i in k] # <-- for this line a get an error
p = [v for i, v in pos.items()]
n = [v for i, v in neg.items()]
So this piece of code will catch no errors during the splitting of the words but it will throw an error when trying to encode the keys again. I should note than normally I wouldn't try to encode the keys again, as I would think they are already properly encoded. But I added this extra encoding to narrow down the source of the error.
Am I missing something? Do you see anything wrong with my code?
to avoid confusion here is a sample code more close to the original that is not trying to encode the keys again
k = ['happy']
for i in range(3):
print('sampling twitter --> {}'.format(i))
myStream.filter(track=k) # <-- this is where I will receive the error in the second iteration
for status in corpus:
p = s.analyze(status).polarity
words = []
# gather real words
for w in status.split(' '):
try:
words.append(w.encode('utf-8'))
except UnicodeDecodeError as e:
print(e)
# assign sentiment of the sentence to the words
for w in words:
if w not in pos:
pos[w] = 0
neg[w] = 0
if p >= 0:
pos[w] += 1
else:
neg[w] += 1
k = pos.keys()
(please suggest a better title for the question)

You get a decode error while you are trying to encode a string. This seems weird but it is due to implicit decode/encode mechanism of Python.
Python allows to encode strings to obtain bytes and decode bytes to obtain strings. This means that Python can encode only strings and decode only bytes.
So when you try to encode bytes, Python (which does not know how to encode bytes) tries to implicitely decode the byte to obtain a string to encode and it uses its default encoding to do that.
This is why you get a decode error while trying to encode something: the implicit decoding.
That means that you are probably trying to encode something which is already encoded.

Note that the error message says "'ascii' codec can't decode ...". That's because when you call encode on something that is already a bytestring in Python 2, it tries to decode it to Unicode first using the default codec.
I'm not sure why you thought that encoding again would be a good idea. Don't do it; the strings are already byetestrings, leave them as that.

Python: Convert utf-8 string to byte string [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Best way to convert string to bytes in Python 3?
(5 answers)
Closed 11 days ago.
I have the following function to parse a utf-8 string from a sequence of bytes
Note -- 'length_size' is the number of bytes it take to represent the length of the utf-8 string
def parse_utf8(self, bytes, length_size):
length = bytes2int(bytes[0:length_size])
value = ''.join(['%c' % b for b in bytes[length_size:length_size+length]])
return value
def bytes2int(raw_bytes, signed=False):
"""
Convert a string of bytes to an integer (assumes little-endian byte order)
"""
if len(raw_bytes) == 0:
return None
fmt = {1:'B', 2:'H', 4:'I', 8:'Q'}[len(raw_bytes)]
if signed:
fmt = fmt.lower()
return struct.unpack('<'+fmt, raw_bytes)[0]
I'd like to write the function in reverse -- i.e. a function that will take a utf-8 encoded string and return it's representation as a byte string.
So far, I have the following:
def create_utf8(self, utf8_string):
return utf8_string.encode('utf-8')
I run into the following error when attempting to test it:
File "writer.py", line 229, in create_utf8
return utf8_string.encode('utf-8')
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x98 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
If possible, I'd like to adopt a structure for the code similar to the parse_utf8 example. What am I doing wrong?
Thank you for your help!
UPDATE: test driver, now correct
def random_utf8_seq(self, length):
# from http://www.w3.org/2001/06/utf-8-test/postscript-utf-8.html
test_charset = u" !\"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?#ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬­ ®¯°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿĂ㥹ĆćČčĎďĐđĘęĚěĹ弾ŁłŃńŇňŐőŒœŔŕŘřŚśŞşŠšŢţŤťŮůŰűŸŹźŻżŽžƒˆˇ˘˙˛˜˝–—‘’‚“”„†‡•…‰‹›€™"
utf8_seq = u""
for i in range(length):
utf8_seq += random.choice(test_charset)
return utf8_seq
I get the following error:
input_str = self.random_utf8_seq(200)
File "writer.py", line 226, in random_utf8_seq
print unicode(utf8_seq, "utf-8")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xbb in position 0: invalid start byte

If utf-8 => bytestring conversion is what do you want then you may use str.encode, but first you need to properly mark the type of source string in your example - prefix with u for unicode:
# coding: utf-8
import random
def random_utf8_seq(length):
# from http://www.w3.org/2001/06/utf-8-test/postscript-utf-8.html
test_charset = u" !\"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?#ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬­ ®¯°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿĂ㥹ĆćČčĎďĐđĘęĚěĹ弾ŁłŃńŇňŐőŒœŔŕŘřŚśŞşŠšŢţŤťŮůŰűŸŹźŻżŽžƒˆˇ˘˙˛˜˝–—‘’‚“”„†‡•…‰‹›€™"
utf8_seq = u''
for i in range(length):
utf8_seq += random.choice(test_charset)
print utf8_seq.encode('utf-8')
return utf8_seq.encode('utf-8')
print( type(random_utf8_seq(200)) )
-- output --
­
õ3×sÔP{Ć.s(Ë°˙ě÷xÓ#bűV—û´ő¢uZÓČn˜0|_"Ðyø`êš·ÏÝhunÍÅ=ä?
óP{tlÇűpb¸7s´ňƒG—čøň\zčłŢXÂYqLĆúěă(ÿî ¥PyÐÔŇnל¦Ì˝+•ì›
ŻÛ°Ñ^ÝC÷ŢŐIñJĹţÒył­"MťÆ‹ČČ4þ!»šåŮ#Öhň-
ÈLGĄ¢ß˛Đ¯.ªÆź˘Ř^ĽÛŹËaĂŕ¹#¢éüÜńlÊqš=VřU…‚–MŽÎÉèoÙŹŠ¨Ð
<type 'str'>

How to print out 0xfb in python

I'm falling the unicode hell.
My environment in on unix, python 2.7.3
LC_CTYPE=zh_TW.UTF-8
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
I'm trying to dump hex encoded data in human readable format, here is simplified code
#! /usr/bin/env python
# encoding:utf-8
import sys
s=u"readable\n" # previous result keep in unicode string
s2="fb is not \xfb" # data read from binary file
s += s2
print s # method 1
print s.encode('utf-8') # method 2
print s.encode('utf-8','ignore') # method 3
print s.decode('iso8859-1') # method 4
# method 1-4 display following error message
#UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xfb
# in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
f = open('out.txt','wb')
f.write(s)
I just want to print out the 0xfb.
I should describe more here. The key is 's += s2'.
Where s will keep my previous decoded string.
And the s2 is next string which should append into s.
If I modified as following, it occurs on write file.
s=u"readable\n"
s2="fb is not \xfb"
s += s2.decode('cp437')
print s
f=open('out.txt','wb')
f.write(s)
# UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character
# u'\u221a' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
I wish the result of out.txt is
readable
fb is not \xfb
or
readable
fb is not 0xfb
[Solution]
#! /usr/bin/env python
# encoding:utf-8
import sys
import binascii
def fmtstr(s):
r = ''
for c in s:
if ord(c) > 128:
r = ''.join([r, "\\x"+binascii.hexlify(c)])
else:
r = ''.join([r, c])
return r
s=u"readable"
s2="fb is not \xfb"
s += fmtstr(s2)
print s
f=open('out.txt','wb')
f.write(s)

I strongly suspect that your code is actually erroring out on the previous line: the s += s2 one. s2 is just a series of bytes, which can't be arbitrarily tacked on to a unicode object (which is instead a series of code points).
If you had intended the '\xfb' to represent U+FB, LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH CIRCUMFLEX, it would have been better to assign it like this instead:
s2 = u"\u00fb"
But you said that you just want to print out \xHH codes for control characters. If you just want it to be something humans can understand which still makes it apparent that special characters are in a string, then repr may be enough. First, don't have s be a unicode object, because you're treating your strings here as a series of bytes, not a series of code points.
s = s.encode('utf-8')
s += s2
print repr(s)
Finally, if you don't want the extra quotes on the outside that repr adds, for nice pretty printing or whatever, there's not a simple builtin way to do that in Python (that I know of). I've used something like this before:
import re
controlchars_re = re.compile(r'[\x00-\x31\x7f-\xff]')
def _show_control_chars(match):
txt = repr(match.group(0))
return txt[1:-1]
def escape_special_characters(s):
return controlchars_re.sub(_show_control_chars, s.replace('\\', '\\\\'))
You can pretty easily tweak the controlchars_re regex to define which characters you care about escaping.

KOI8-R: Having trouble translating a string

This Python script gets translit for Russian letters:
s = u'Код Обмена Информацией, 8 бит'.encode('koi8-r')
print ''.join([chr(ord(c) & 0x7F) for c in s]) # kOD oBMENA iNFORMACIEJ, 8 BIT
That works. But I want to modify it so as to get user input. Now I'm stuck at this:
s = raw_input("Enter a string you want to translit: ")
s = unicode(s)
s = s.encode('koi8-r')
print ''.join([chr(ord(c) & 0x7F) for c in s])
Ending up with this:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
What's wrong?

s = unicode(s) expects ascii encoding by default. You need to supply it an encoding your input is in, e.g. s = unicode(s, 'utf-8').

try unicode(s, encoding) where encoding is whatever your terminal is in.

Looking at the error messages that you are seeing, it seems to me that your terminal encoding is probably set to KOI8-R, in which case you don't need to perform any decoding on the input data. If this is the case then all you need is:
>>> s = raw_input("Enter a string you want to translit: ")
>>> print ''.join([chr(ord(c) & 0x7F) for c in s])
kOD oBMENA iNFORMACIEJ, 8 BIT
You can double check this by s.decode('koi8-r') which should succeed and return the equivalent unicode string.