Unicode problems in Python again - python

I have a strange problem. A friend of mine sent me a text file. If I copy/paste the text and then paste it into my text editor and save it, the following code works. If I choose the option to save the file directly from the browser, the following code breaks. What's going on? Is it the browser's fault for saving invalid characters?
This is an example line.
When I save it, the line says
What�s going on?
When I copy/paste it, the line says
What’s going on?
This is the code:
import codecs
def do_stuff(filename):
with codecs.open(filename, encoding='utf-8') as f:
def process_line(line):
return line.strip()
lines = f.readlines()
for line in lines:
line = process_line(line)
print line
do_stuff('stuff.txt')
This is the traceback I get:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "test-encoding.py", line 13, in <module>
do_stuff('stuff.txt')
File "test-encoding.py", line 8, in do_stuff
lines = f.readlines()
File "/home/somebody/.python/lib64/python2.7/codecs.py", line 679, in readlines
return self.reader.readlines(sizehint)
File "/home/somebody/.python/lib64/python2.7/codecs.py", line 588, in readlines
data = self.read()
File "/home/somebody/.python/lib64/python2.7/codecs.py", line 477, in read
newchars, decodedbytes = self.decode(data, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x92 in position 4: invalid start byte
What can I do in such cases?
How can I distribute the script if I don't know what encoding the user who runs it will use?
Fixed:
codecs.open(filename, encoding='utf-8', errors='ignore') as f:

The "file-oriented" part of the browser works with raw bytes, not characters. The specific encoding used by the page should be specified either in the HTTP headers or in the HTML itself. You must use this encoding instead of assuming that you have UTF-8 data.

Related

Unable to encode a unicode into a .txt file in python

So while trying to mess around with python i tried making a program which would get me the content from pastebin url's and then save each ones content into a file of their own. I got an error
This is the code :-
import requests
file = open("file.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8").readlines()
for line in file:
link = line.rstrip("\n")
n_link = link.replace("https://pastebin.com/", "https://pastebin.com/raw/")
pastebin = n_link.replace("https://pastebin.com/raw/", "")
r = requests.get(n_link, timeout=3)
x = open(f"{pastebin}.txt", "a+")
x.write(r.text)
x.close
I get the following error :-
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\Lenovo\Desktop\Py\Misc. Scripts\ai.py", line 9, in <module>
x.write(r.text)
File "C:\Users\Lenovo\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 19, in encode
return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_table)[0]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2694' in position 9721: character maps to <undefined>
Can somebody help?
You’re doing good at the start by reading in the input file as UTF-8. The only thing you’re missing is to do the same thing with your output file:
x = open(f"{pastebin}.txt", "a+", encoding="utf-8")

Python function to turn internationalized domain name from U-Label to A-Label? [duplicate]

I have a long list of domain names which I need to generate some reports on. The list contains some IDN domains, and although I know how to convert them in python on the command line:
>>> domain = u"pfarmerü.com"
>>> domain
u'pfarmer\xfc.com'
>>> domain.encode("idna")
'xn--pfarmer-t2a.com'
>>>
I'm struggling to get it to work with a small script reading data from the text file.
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
infile = open(sys.argv[1])
for line in infile:
print line,
domain = unicode(line.strip())
print type(domain)
print "IDN:", domain.encode("idna")
print
I get the following output:
$ ./idn.py ./test
pfarmer.com
<type 'unicode'>
IDN: pfarmer.com
pfarmerü.com
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./idn.py", line 9, in <module>
domain = unicode(line.strip())
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xfc in position 7: ordinal not in range(128)
I have also tried:
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import codecs
infile = codecs.open(sys.argv[1], "r", "utf8")
for line in infile:
print line,
domain = line.strip()
print type(domain)
print "IDN:", domain.encode("idna")
print
Which gave me:
$ ./idn.py ./test
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./idn.py", line 8, in <module>
for line in infile:
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 679, in next
return self.reader.next()
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 610, in next
line = self.readline()
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 525, in readline
data = self.read(readsize, firstline=True)
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 472, in read
newchars, decodedbytes = self.decode(data, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position 0-5: unsupported Unicode code range
Here is my test data file:
pfarmer.com
pfarmerü.com
I'm very aware of my need to understand unicode now.
Thanks,
Peter
you need to know in which encoding you file was saved. This would be something like 'utf-8' (which is NOT Unicode) or 'iso-8859-1' or 'cp1252' or alike.
Then you can do (assuming 'utf-8'):
infile = open(sys.argv[1])
for line in infile:
print line,
domain = line.strip().decode('utf-8')
print type(domain)
print "IDN:", domain.encode("idna")
print
Convert encoded strings to unicode with decode. Convert unicode to string with encode. If you try to encode something which is already encoded, python tries to decode first, with the default codec 'ascii' which fails for non-ASCII-values.
Your first example is fine, except that:
domain = unicode(line.strip())
you have to specify a particular encoding here: unicode(line.strip(), 'utf-8'). Otherwise you get the default encoding which for safety is 7-bit ASCII, hence the error. Alternatively you can spell it line.strip().decode('utf-8') as in knitti's example; there is no difference in behaviour between the two syntaxes.
However judging by the error “can't decode byte 0xfc”, I think you haven't actually saved your test file as UTF-8. Presumably this is why the second example, that also looks OK in principle, fails.
Instead it's ISO-8859-1 or the very similar Windows code page 1252. If it's come from a text editor on a Western Windows box it will certainly be the latter; Linux machines use UTF-8 by default instead nowadays. Either make sure to save your file as UTF-8, or read the file using the encoding 'cp1252' instead.

Terrible "invalid start byte" Unicode Error with Opening a CSV file

Please please please help. I've been strugglign with this for a while and ran into problem after problem. I'm just trying to make a loop that opens every csv file in a folder. Here's the loop:
folder = '/Users/jolijttamanaha/Documents/Senior/Thesis/Python/TextAnalysis/datedmatchedngrams2/'
for file in os.listdir (folder):
with codecs.open(file, mode='rU', encoding='utf-8') as f:
m=min(int(line[1]) for line in csv.reader(f))
f.seek(0)
for line in csv.reader(f):
if int(line[1])==m:
print line
Here's the error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "findfirsttrigram.py", line 11, in <module>
m=min(int(line[1]) for line in csv.reader(f))
File "findfirsttrigram.py", line 11, in <genexpr>
m=min(int(line[1]) for line in csv.reader(f))
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 684, in next
return self.reader.next()
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 615, in next
line = self.readline()
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 530, in readline
data = self.read(readsize, firstline=True)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 477, in read
newchars, decodedbytes = self.decode(data, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x87 in position 0: invalid start byte
I got here because first I had a "Null Byte" error, which I solved with this post: "Line contains NULL byte" in CSV reader (Python)
Then I got an integer error, which I solved with this post "an integer is required" when open()'ing a file as utf-8?
Then I got an error that said: 'UnicodeException: UTF-16 stream does not start with BOM' which I solved with this post utf-16 file seeking in python. how?
Then I realized that the csv module requires utf-8 so here I am.
But I've finally hit the limit of the existing questions. I can't figure out what is going on. Please please help.
I'm not sure why but this ultimately worked:
import csv
import os
import unicodecsv
folder = '/Users/jolijttamanaha/Documents/Senior/Thesis/Python/TextAnalysis/datedmatchedngrams3/'
for file in os.listdir (folder):
with open(os.path.join(folder, file), mode='rU') as f:
try:
m=min(int(line[1]) for line in unicodecsv.reader(f, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace'))
except:
print "one no work"
continue
f.seek(0)
for line in unicodecsv.reader(f):
if int(line[1])==m:
print line
Perhaps try using a os.walk along with using for files in files?
folder = '/Users/jolijttamanaha/Documents/Senior/Thesis/Python/TextAnalysis/datedmatchedngrams2/'
for subdir, dirs, files in os.walk(folder):
for file in files:
with codecs.open(file, mode='rU', encoding='utf-16-be') as f:
#Your code here
Clearly then your file is not encoded in UTF-8. Try another encoding. If you're using Windows, 'mbcs' will use the default encoding for your version of Windows.

Converting domain names to idn in python

I have a long list of domain names which I need to generate some reports on. The list contains some IDN domains, and although I know how to convert them in python on the command line:
>>> domain = u"pfarmerü.com"
>>> domain
u'pfarmer\xfc.com'
>>> domain.encode("idna")
'xn--pfarmer-t2a.com'
>>>
I'm struggling to get it to work with a small script reading data from the text file.
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
infile = open(sys.argv[1])
for line in infile:
print line,
domain = unicode(line.strip())
print type(domain)
print "IDN:", domain.encode("idna")
print
I get the following output:
$ ./idn.py ./test
pfarmer.com
<type 'unicode'>
IDN: pfarmer.com
pfarmerü.com
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./idn.py", line 9, in <module>
domain = unicode(line.strip())
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xfc in position 7: ordinal not in range(128)
I have also tried:
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import codecs
infile = codecs.open(sys.argv[1], "r", "utf8")
for line in infile:
print line,
domain = line.strip()
print type(domain)
print "IDN:", domain.encode("idna")
print
Which gave me:
$ ./idn.py ./test
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./idn.py", line 8, in <module>
for line in infile:
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 679, in next
return self.reader.next()
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 610, in next
line = self.readline()
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 525, in readline
data = self.read(readsize, firstline=True)
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 472, in read
newchars, decodedbytes = self.decode(data, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position 0-5: unsupported Unicode code range
Here is my test data file:
pfarmer.com
pfarmerü.com
I'm very aware of my need to understand unicode now.
Thanks,
Peter
you need to know in which encoding you file was saved. This would be something like 'utf-8' (which is NOT Unicode) or 'iso-8859-1' or 'cp1252' or alike.
Then you can do (assuming 'utf-8'):
infile = open(sys.argv[1])
for line in infile:
print line,
domain = line.strip().decode('utf-8')
print type(domain)
print "IDN:", domain.encode("idna")
print
Convert encoded strings to unicode with decode. Convert unicode to string with encode. If you try to encode something which is already encoded, python tries to decode first, with the default codec 'ascii' which fails for non-ASCII-values.
Your first example is fine, except that:
domain = unicode(line.strip())
you have to specify a particular encoding here: unicode(line.strip(), 'utf-8'). Otherwise you get the default encoding which for safety is 7-bit ASCII, hence the error. Alternatively you can spell it line.strip().decode('utf-8') as in knitti's example; there is no difference in behaviour between the two syntaxes.
However judging by the error “can't decode byte 0xfc”, I think you haven't actually saved your test file as UTF-8. Presumably this is why the second example, that also looks OK in principle, fails.
Instead it's ISO-8859-1 or the very similar Windows code page 1252. If it's come from a text editor on a Western Windows box it will certainly be the latter; Linux machines use UTF-8 by default instead nowadays. Either make sure to save your file as UTF-8, or read the file using the encoding 'cp1252' instead.

UnicodeDecodeError when reading dictionary words file with simple Python script

First time doing Python in a while, and I'm having trouble doing a simple scan of a file when I run the following script with Python 3.0.1,
with open("/usr/share/dict/words", 'r') as f:
for line in f:
pass
I get this exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/matt/install/test.py", line 2, in <module>
for line in f:
File "/home/matt/install/root/lib/python3.0/io.py", line 1744, in __next__
line = self.readline()
File "/home/matt/install/root/lib/python3.0/io.py", line 1817, in readline
while self._read_chunk():
File "/home/matt/install/root/lib/python3.0/io.py", line 1565, in _read_chunk
self._set_decoded_chars(self._decoder.decode(input_chunk, eof))
File "/home/matt/install/root/lib/python3.0/io.py", line 1299, in decode
output = self.decoder.decode(input, final=final)
File "/home/matt/install/root/lib/python3.0/codecs.py", line 300, in decode
(result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position 1689-1692: invalid data
The line in the file it blows up on is "Argentinian", which doesn't seem to be unusual in any way.
Update: I added,
encoding="iso-8559-1"
to the open() call, and it fixed the problem.
How have you determined from "position 1689-1692" what line in the file it has blown up on? Those numbers would be offsets in the chunk that it's trying to decode. You would have had to determine what chunk it was -- how?
Try this at the interactive prompt:
buf = open('the_file', 'rb').read()
len(buf)
ubuf = buf.decode('utf8')
# splat ... but it will give you the byte offset into the file
buf[offset-50:60] # should show you where/what the problem is
# By the way, from the error message, looks like a bad
# FOUR-byte UTF-8 character ... interesting
Can you check to make sure it is valid UTF-8? A way to do that is given at this SO question:
iconv -f UTF-8 /usr/share/dict/words -o /dev/null
There are other ways to do the same thing.

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