My Django application is working with both .txt and .doc filetypes. And this application opens a file, compares it with other files in db and prints out some report.
Now the problem is that, when file type is .txt, I get 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte error (here I'm using encoding='utf-8'). When I switch encoding='utf-8' to encoding='ISO-8859-1' error changes to 'latin-1' codec can't decode byte.
I want to find such encoding format that works with every type of a file. This is a small part of my function:
views.py:
#login_required(login_url='sign_in')
def result(request):
last_uploaded = OriginalDocument.objects.latest('id')
original = open(str(last_uploaded.document), 'r', encoding='utf-8')
original_words = original.read().lower().split()
words_count = len(original_words)
open_original = open(str(last_uploaded.document), "r")
read_original = open_original.read()
report_fives = open("static/report_documents/" + str(last_uploaded.student_name) +
"-" + str(last_uploaded.document_title) + "-5.txt", 'w')
# Path to the documents with which original doc is comparing
path = 'static/other_documents/doc*.txt'
files = glob.glob(path)
rows, found_count, fives_count, rounded_percentage_five, percentage_for_chart_five, fives_for_report, founded_docs_for_report = search_by_five(last_uploaded, 5, original_words, report_fives, files)
context = {
...
}
return render(request, 'result.html', context)
There is no general encoding which automatically knows how to decode an already encoded file in a specific encoding.
UTF-8 is a good option with many compatibilities with other encodings. You can e.g. simply ignore or replace characters which aren't decodable like this:
from codecs import open
original = open(str(last_uploaded.document), encoding="utf-8", errors="ignore")
original_words = original.read().lower().split()
...
original.close()
Or even using a context manager (with statement) who closes the file for you:
with open(str(last_uploaded.document), encoding="utf-8", errors="ignore") as fr:
original_words = fr.read().lower().split()
...
(Note: You do not need to use the codecs library if you're using Python 3, but you have tagged your question with python-2.7.)
You can see advantages and disadvantages of using different error handlers here and here. You have to know that not using an error handler will default to using errors="strict" which you probably do not want. Other options may be nearly self-explaining, e.g.:
using errors="replace" will replace an undecodable character with a suitable replacement marker
using errors="ignore" will simply ignore the character and continues reading the file data.
What you should use depends on your needs and usecase(s).
You're saying that you also have encoding problems not only with plain text files, but also with proprietary doc files:
The .doc format is not a plain text file which you can simply read with open() or codecs.open() since there are many information stored in binary format, see this site for more information. So you need a special reader for .doc files to get the text from it. Which library you are using depends on your Python version and maybe also on the operating system you are using. Maybe here is a good starting point for you.
Unfortunately, using a library does not prevent you completely from encoding errors. (Maybe yes, but I'm not sure if the encoding is saved in the file itself like in a .docx file.) You maybe also have the chance to figure out the encoding of the file. How you can handle encoding errors likely depends on the library itself.
So I just guess that you are trying opening .doc files as simple text files. Then you will get decoding errors, because it's not saved as human readable text. And even if you get rid of the error, you only will see the non human readable text: (I've created a simple text file with LibreOffice in doc-format (Microsoft Word 1997-2003)):
In [1]: open("./test.doc", "r").read()
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can`t decode byte 0xd0 in position 0: invalid continuation byte
In [2]: open("./test.doc", "r", errors="replace").read() # or open("./test.doc", "rb").read()
'��\x11\u0871\x1a�\x00\x00\x00' ...
Related
https://github.com/affinelayer/pix2pix-tensorflow/tree/master/tools
An error occurred when compiling "process.py" on the above site.
python tools/process.py --input_dir data -- operation resize --outp
ut_dir data2/resize
data/0.jpg -> data2/resize/0.png
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "tools/process.py", line 235, in <module>
main()
File "tools/process.py", line 167, in main
src = load(src_path)
File "tools/process.py", line 113, in load
contents = open(path).read()
File"/home/user/anaconda3/envs/tensorflow_2/lib/python3.5/codecs.py", line 321, in decode
(result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte
What is the cause of the error?
Python's version is 3.5.2.
Python tries to convert a byte-array (a bytes which it assumes to be a utf-8-encoded string) to a unicode string (str). This process of course is a decoding according to utf-8 rules. When it tries this, it encounters a byte sequence which is not allowed in utf-8-encoded strings (namely this 0xff at position 0).
Since you did not provide any code we could look at, we only could guess on the rest.
From the stack trace we can assume that the triggering action was the reading from a file (contents = open(path).read()). I propose to recode this in a fashion like this:
with open(path, 'rb') as f:
contents = f.read()
That b in the mode specifier in the open() states that the file shall be treated as binary, so contents will remain a bytes. No decoding attempt will happen this way.
Use this solution it will strip out (ignore) the characters and return the string without them. Only use this if your need is to strip them not convert them.
with open(path, encoding="utf8", errors='ignore') as f:
Using errors='ignore'
You'll just lose some characters. but if your don't care about them as they seem to be extra characters originating from a the bad formatting and programming of the clients connecting to my socket server.
Then its a easy direct solution.
reference
Use encoding format ISO-8859-1 to solve the issue.
Had an issue similar to this, Ended up using UTF-16 to decode. my code is below.
with open(path_to_file,'rb') as f:
contents = f.read()
contents = contents.rstrip("\n").decode("utf-16")
contents = contents.split("\r\n")
this would take the file contents as an import, but it would return the code in UTF format. from there it would be decoded and seperated by lines.
I've come across this thread when suffering the same error, after doing some research I can confirm, this is an error that happens when you try to decode a UTF-16 file with UTF-8.
With UTF-16 the first characther (2 bytes in UTF-16) is a Byte Order Mark (BOM), which is used as a decoding hint and doesn't appear as a character in the decoded string. This means the first byte will be either FE or FF and the second, the other.
Heavily edited after I found out the real answer
It simply means that one chose the wrong encoding to read the file.
On Mac, use file -I file.txt to find the correct encoding. On Linux, use file -i file.txt.
I had a similar issue with PNG files. and I tried the solutions above without success.
this one worked for me in python 3.8
with open(path, "rb") as f:
use only
base64.b64decode(a)
instead of
base64.b64decode(a).decode('utf-8')
This is due to the different encoding method when read the file. In python, it defaultly
encode the data with unicode. However, it may not works in various platforms.
I propose an encoding method which can help you solve this if 'utf-8' not works.
with open(path, newline='', encoding='cp1252') as csvfile:
reader = csv.reader(csvfile)
It should works if you change the encoding method here. Also, you can find other encoding method here standard-encodings , if above doesn't work for you.
Those getting similar errors while handling Pandas for data frames use the following solution.
example solution.
df = pd.read_csv("File path", encoding='cp1252')
I had this UnicodeDecodeError while trying to read a '.csv' file using pandas.read_csv(). In my case, I could not manage to overcome this issue using other encoder types. But instead of using
pd.read_csv(filename, delimiter=';')
I used:
pd.read_csv(open(filename, 'r'), delimiter=';')
which just seems working fine for me.
Note that: In open() function, use 'r' instead of 'rb'. Because 'rb' returns bytes object that causes to happen this decoder error in the first place, that is the same problem in the read_csv(). But 'r' returns str which is needed since our data is in .csv, and using the default encoding='utf-8' parameter, we can easily parse the data using read_csv() function.
if you are receiving data from a serial port, make sure you are using the right baudrate (and the other configs ) : decoding using (utf-8) but the wrong config will generate the same error
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte
to check your serial port config on linux use : stty -F /dev/ttyUSBX -a
I had a similar issue and searched all the internet for this problem
if you have this problem just copy your HTML code in a new HTML file and use the normal <meta charset="UTF-8">
and it will work....
just create a new HTML file in the same location and use a different name
Check the path of the file to be read. My code kept on giving me errors until I changed the path name to present working directory. The error was:
newchars, decodedbytes = self.decode(data, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte
If you are on a mac check if you for a hidden file, .DS_Store. After removing the file my program worked.
I had a similar problem.
Solved it by:
import io
with io.open(filename, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as fn:
lines = fn.readlines()
However, I had another problem. Some html files (in my case) were not utf-8, so I received a similar error. When I excluded those html files, everything worked smoothly.
So, except from fixing the code, check also the files you are reading from, maybe there is an incompatibility there indeed.
You have to use the encoding as latin1 to read this file as there are some special character in this file, use the below code snippet to read the file.
The problem here is the encoding type. When Python can't convert the data to be read, it gives an error.
You can you latin1 or other encoding values.
I say try and test to find the right one for your dataset.
I have the same issue when processing a file generated from Linux. It turns out it was related with files containing question marks..
Following code worked in my case:
df = pd.read_csv(filename,sep = '\t', encoding='cp1252')
If possible, open the file in a text editor and try to change the encoding to UTF-8. Otherwise do it programatically at the OS level.
I've just added Python3 interpreter to Sublime, and the following code stopped working:
for directory in directoryList:
fileList = os.listdir(directory)
for filename in fileList:
filename = os.path.join(directory, filename)
currentFile = open(filename, 'rt')
for line in currentFile: ##Here comes the exception.
currentLine = line.split(' ')
for word in currentLine:
if word.lower() not in bigBagOfWords:
bigBagOfWords.append(word.lower())
currentFile.close()
I get a following exception:
File "/Users/Kuba/Desktop/DictionaryCreator.py", line 11, in <module>
for line in currentFile:
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.4/lib/python3.4/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xcc in position 305: ordinal not in range(128)
I found this rather strange, because as far as I know Python3 is supposed to support utf-8 everywhere. What's more, the same exact code works with no problems on Python2.7. I've read about adding environmental variable PYTHONIOENCODING, but I tried it - to no avail (however, it appears it is not that easy to add an environmental variable in OS X Mavericks, so maybe I did something wrong with adding the variable? I modidified /etc/launchd.conf)
Python 3 decodes text files when reading, encodes when writing. The default encoding is taken from locale.getpreferredencoding(False), which evidently for your setup returns 'ASCII'. See the open() function documenation:
In text mode, if encoding is not specified the encoding used is platform dependent: locale.getpreferredencoding(False) is called to get the current locale encoding.
Instead of relying on a system setting, you should open your text files using an explicit codec:
currentFile = open(filename, 'rt', encoding='latin1')
where you set the encoding parameter to match the file you are reading.
Python 3 supports UTF-8 as the default for source code.
The same applies to writing to a writeable text file; data written will be encoded, and if you rely on the system encoding you are liable to get UnicodeEncodingError exceptions unless you explicitly set a suitable codec. What codec to use when writing depends on what text you are writing and what you plan to do with the file afterward.
You may want to read up on Python 3 and Unicode in the Unicode HOWTO, which explains both about source code encoding and reading and writing Unicode data.
"as far as I know Python3 is supposed to support utf-8 everywhere ..."
Not true. I have python 3.6 and my default encoding is NOT utf-8.
To change it to utf-8 in my code I use:
import locale
def getpreferredencoding(do_setlocale = True):
return "utf-8"
locale.getpreferredencoding = getpreferredencoding
as explained in
Changing the “locale preferred encoding” in Python 3 in Windows
In general, I found 3 ways to fix Unicode related Errors in Python3:
Use the encoding explicitly like currentFile = open(filename, 'rt',encoding='utf-8')
As the bytes have no encoding, convert the string data to bytes before writing to file like data = 'string'.encode('utf-8')
Especially in Linux environment, check $LANG. Such issue usually arises when LANG=C which makes default encoding as 'ascii' instead of 'utf-8'. One can change it with other appropriate value like LANG='en_IN'
I've just added Python3 interpreter to Sublime, and the following code stopped working:
for directory in directoryList:
fileList = os.listdir(directory)
for filename in fileList:
filename = os.path.join(directory, filename)
currentFile = open(filename, 'rt')
for line in currentFile: ##Here comes the exception.
currentLine = line.split(' ')
for word in currentLine:
if word.lower() not in bigBagOfWords:
bigBagOfWords.append(word.lower())
currentFile.close()
I get a following exception:
File "/Users/Kuba/Desktop/DictionaryCreator.py", line 11, in <module>
for line in currentFile:
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.4/lib/python3.4/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xcc in position 305: ordinal not in range(128)
I found this rather strange, because as far as I know Python3 is supposed to support utf-8 everywhere. What's more, the same exact code works with no problems on Python2.7. I've read about adding environmental variable PYTHONIOENCODING, but I tried it - to no avail (however, it appears it is not that easy to add an environmental variable in OS X Mavericks, so maybe I did something wrong with adding the variable? I modidified /etc/launchd.conf)
Python 3 decodes text files when reading, encodes when writing. The default encoding is taken from locale.getpreferredencoding(False), which evidently for your setup returns 'ASCII'. See the open() function documenation:
In text mode, if encoding is not specified the encoding used is platform dependent: locale.getpreferredencoding(False) is called to get the current locale encoding.
Instead of relying on a system setting, you should open your text files using an explicit codec:
currentFile = open(filename, 'rt', encoding='latin1')
where you set the encoding parameter to match the file you are reading.
Python 3 supports UTF-8 as the default for source code.
The same applies to writing to a writeable text file; data written will be encoded, and if you rely on the system encoding you are liable to get UnicodeEncodingError exceptions unless you explicitly set a suitable codec. What codec to use when writing depends on what text you are writing and what you plan to do with the file afterward.
You may want to read up on Python 3 and Unicode in the Unicode HOWTO, which explains both about source code encoding and reading and writing Unicode data.
"as far as I know Python3 is supposed to support utf-8 everywhere ..."
Not true. I have python 3.6 and my default encoding is NOT utf-8.
To change it to utf-8 in my code I use:
import locale
def getpreferredencoding(do_setlocale = True):
return "utf-8"
locale.getpreferredencoding = getpreferredencoding
as explained in
Changing the “locale preferred encoding” in Python 3 in Windows
In general, I found 3 ways to fix Unicode related Errors in Python3:
Use the encoding explicitly like currentFile = open(filename, 'rt',encoding='utf-8')
As the bytes have no encoding, convert the string data to bytes before writing to file like data = 'string'.encode('utf-8')
Especially in Linux environment, check $LANG. Such issue usually arises when LANG=C which makes default encoding as 'ascii' instead of 'utf-8'. One can change it with other appropriate value like LANG='en_IN'
i am learning python, and i am having troubles with saving the output of a small function to file. My python function is the following:
#!/usr/local/bin/python
import subprocess
import codecs
airport = '/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport'
def getAirportInfo():
arguments = [airport, "--scan" , "--xml"]
execute = subprocess.Popen(arguments, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
out, err = execute.communicate()
print out
return out
airportInfo = getAirportInfo()
outFile = codecs.open('wifi-data.txt', 'w')
outFile.write(airportInfo)
outFile.close()
I guess that this would only work on a Mac, as it references some PrivateFrameworks.
Anyways, the code almost works as it should. The print statement prints a huge xml file, that i'd like to store in a file, for future processing. And here start the problems.
In the version above, the script executes without any errors, however, when i try to open the file, i get an error message, along the lines of error with utf-8 encoding. Ignoring this, opens the file, and most of the things look fine, except for a couple of things:
some SSID have non-ascii characters, like ä, ö and ü. When printing those on the screen, they are correctly displayed as \xc3\xa4 and so on. When I open the file it is displayed incorrectly, the usual random garbage.
some of the xml values look like these when printed on screen: Data("\x00\x11WLAN-0024FE056185\x01\x08\x82\x84\x8b\x96\x0c\ … x10D\x00\x01\x02") but like this when read from file: //8AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==
I thought it could be an encoding error (seen as the Umlauts have problems, the error message says something about the utf-8 encoding being messed up, and the text containing \x type of characters), and i tried looking here for possible solutions. However, no matter what i do, there are still errors:
adding an additional argument 'utf-8' to the codecs.open yields a
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x9a in position 24227: ordinal not in range(128) and the generated file is empty.
explicitly encoding to utf-8 with outFile.write(airportInfo.encode('utf-8')) before saving results in the same error
not being an expert, i tried decoding it, maybe i was just doing the exact opposite of what needed to be done, but i got an UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x8a in position 8980: invalid start byte
The only the thing that worked (unsurprisingly), was to write the repr() of the string to file, but that is just not what i need, and also i can't make a nice .plist of a file full with escape symbols.
So please, please, can somebody help me? What am i missing?
If it helps, the type that gets saved in airportInfo is str (as in type(airportInfo) == str) and not u
You don't need re-encoding when your text is already unicode. Just write the text to a file. It should just work.
In [1]: t = 'äïöú'
In [2]: with open('test.txt', 'w') as f:
f.write(t)
...:
Additionally, you can make getAirportInfo simpler by using subprocess.check_output(). Also, mixed case names should only be used for classes, not functions. See PEP8.
import subprocess
def get_airport_info():
args = ['/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport',
'--scan', '--xml']
return subprocess.check_output(args)
airportInfo = get_airport_info()
with open('wifi-data.txt', 'w') as outf:
outf.write(airportinfo)
I should have read this before my original answer:
What is the difference between encode/decode?
I always get confused between string and unicode conversion. On my mac, import sys; sys.getfilesystemencoding() suggests that subprocess returns a 'utf-8' string - so I don't know why airportInfo.encode('utf-8') fails. Is it possible to do airportInfo.encode('utf-8', 'ignore') and throw out the invalid characters?
Also - have you tried writing your file as wb: outFile = codecs.open('wifi-data.txt', 'wb') - doesn't 'w' open an ascii file?
Regarding your text editor - that may handle unicode characters differently. If it's reading a unicode text file as ascii, then the unicode characters may appear a garbled mess. You might try naming the file .xml, in which depending on your text editor may read it better as unicode.
I'm trying to get a Python 3 program to do some manipulations with a text file filled with information. However, when trying to read the file I get the following error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "SCRIPT LOCATION", line NUMBER, in <module>
text = file.read()
File "C:\Python31\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 23, in decode
return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x90 in position 2907500: character maps to `<undefined>`
The file in question is not using the CP1252 encoding. It's using another encoding. Which one you have to figure out yourself. Common ones are Latin-1 and UTF-8. Since 0x90 doesn't actually mean anything in Latin-1, UTF-8 (where 0x90 is a continuation byte) is more likely.
You specify the encoding when you open the file:
file = open(filename, encoding="utf8")
If file = open(filename, encoding="utf-8") doesn't work, try
file = open(filename, errors="ignore"), if you want to remove unneeded characters. (docs)
Alternatively, if you don't need to decode the file, such as uploading the file to a website, use:
open(filename, 'rb')
where r = reading, b = binary
As an extension to #LennartRegebro's answer:
If you can't tell what encoding your file uses and the solution above does not work (it's not utf8) and you found yourself merely guessing - there are online tools that you could use to identify what encoding that is. They aren't perfect but usually work just fine. After you figure out the encoding you should be able to use solution above.
EDIT: (Copied from comment)
A quite popular text editor Sublime Text has a command to display encoding if it has been set...
Go to View -> Show Console (or Ctrl+`)
Type into field at the bottom view.encoding() and hope for the best (I was unable to get anything but Undefined but maybe you will have better luck...)
TLDR: Try: file = open(filename, encoding='cp437')
Why? When one uses:
file = open(filename)
text = file.read()
Python assumes the file uses the same codepage as current environment (cp1252 in case of the opening post) and tries to decode it to its own default UTF-8. If the file contains characters of values not defined in this codepage (like 0x90) we get UnicodeDecodeError. Sometimes we don't know the encoding of the file, sometimes the file's encoding may be unhandled by Python (like e.g. cp790), sometimes the file can contain mixed encodings.
If such characters are unneeded, one may decide to replace them by question marks, with:
file = open(filename, errors='replace')
Another workaround is to use:
file = open(filename, errors='ignore')
The characters are then left intact, but other errors will be masked too.
A very good solution is to specify the encoding, yet not any encoding (like cp1252), but the one which has ALL characters defined (like cp437):
file = open(filename, encoding='cp437')
Codepage 437 is the original DOS encoding. All codes are defined, so there are no errors while reading the file, no errors are masked out, the characters are preserved (not quite left intact but still distinguishable).
Stop wasting your time, just add the following encoding="cp437" and errors='ignore' to your code in both read and write:
open('filename.csv', encoding="cp437", errors='ignore')
open(file_name, 'w', newline='', encoding="cp437", errors='ignore')
Godspeed
for me encoding with utf16 worked
file = open('filename.csv', encoding="utf16")
def read_files(file_path):
with open(file_path, encoding='utf8') as f:
text = f.read()
return text
OR (AND)
def read_files(text, file_path):
with open(file_path, 'rb') as f:
f.write(text.encode('utf8', 'ignore'))
For those working in Anaconda in Windows, I had the same problem. Notepad++ help me to solve it.
Open the file in Notepad++. In the bottom right it will tell you the current file encoding.
In the top menu, next to "View" locate "Encoding". In "Encoding" go to "character sets" and there with patiente look for the enconding that you need. In my case the encoding "Windows-1252" was found under "Western European"
Before you apply the suggested solution, you can check what is the Unicode character that appeared in your file (and in the error log), in this case 0x90: https://unicodelookup.com/#0x90/1 (or directly at Unicode Consortium site http://www.unicode.org/charts/ by searching 0x0090)
and then consider removing it from the file.
In the newer version of Python (starting with 3.7), you can add the interpreter option -Xutf8, which should fix your problem. If you use Pycharm, just got to Run > Edit configurations (in tab Configuration change value in field Interpreter options to -Xutf8).
Or, equivalently, you can just set the environmental variable PYTHONUTF8 to 1.
for me changing the Mysql character encoding the same as my code helped to sort out the solution. photo=open('pic3.png',encoding=latin1)