as3:~/ngokevin-site# nano content/blog/20140114_test-chinese.mkd
as3:~/ngokevin-site# wok
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/bin/wok", line 4, in
Engine()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/wok/engine.py", line 104, in init
self.load_pages()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/wok/engine.py", line 238, in load_pages
p = Page.from_file(os.path.join(root, f), self.options, self, renderer)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/wok/page.py", line 111, in from_file
page.meta['content'] = page.renderer.render(page.original)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/wok/renderers.py", line 46, in render
return markdown(plain, Markdown.plugins)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/markdown/init.py", line 419, in markdown
return md.convert(text)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/markdown/init.py", line 281, in convert
source = unicode(source)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe8 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128). -- Note: Markdown only accepts unicode input!
How to fix it?
In some other python-based static blog apps, Chinese post can be published successfully.
Such as this app: http://github.com/vrypan/bucket3. In my site http://bc3.brite.biz/, Chinese post can be published successfully.
tl;dr / quick fix
Don't decode/encode willy nilly
Don't assume your strings are UTF-8 encoded
Try to convert strings to Unicode strings as soon as possible in your code
Fix your locale: How to solve UnicodeDecodeError in Python 3.6?
Don't be tempted to use quick reload hacks
Unicode Zen in Python 2.x - The Long Version
Without seeing the source it's difficult to know the root cause, so I'll have to speak generally.
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte generally happens when you try to convert a Python 2.x str that contains non-ASCII to a Unicode string without specifying the encoding of the original string.
In brief, Unicode strings are an entirely separate type of Python string that does not contain any encoding. They only hold Unicode point codes and therefore can hold any Unicode point from across the entire spectrum. Strings contain encoded text, beit UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8895-1, GBK, Big5 etc. Strings are decoded to Unicode and Unicodes are encoded to strings. Files and text data are always transferred in encoded strings.
The Markdown module authors probably use unicode() (where the exception is thrown) as a quality gate to the rest of the code - it will convert ASCII or re-wrap existing Unicodes strings to a new Unicode string. The Markdown authors can't know the encoding of the incoming string so will rely on you to decode strings to Unicode strings before passing to Markdown.
Unicode strings can be declared in your code using the u prefix to strings. E.g.
>>> my_u = u'my ünicôdé strįng'
>>> type(my_u)
<type 'unicode'>
Unicode strings may also come from file, databases and network modules. When this happens, you don't need to worry about the encoding.
Gotchas
Conversion from str to Unicode can happen even when you don't explicitly call unicode().
The following scenarios cause UnicodeDecodeError exceptions:
# Explicit conversion without encoding
unicode('€')
# New style format string into Unicode string
# Python will try to convert value string to Unicode first
u"The currency is: {}".format('€')
# Old style format string into Unicode string
# Python will try to convert value string to Unicode first
u'The currency is: %s' % '€'
# Append string to Unicode
# Python will try to convert string to Unicode first
u'The currency is: ' + '€'
Examples
In the following diagram, you can see how the word café has been encoded in either "UTF-8" or "Cp1252" encoding depending on the terminal type. In both examples, caf is just regular ascii. In UTF-8, é is encoded using two bytes. In "Cp1252", é is 0xE9 (which is also happens to be the Unicode point value (it's no coincidence)). The correct decode() is invoked and conversion to a Python Unicode is successfull:
In this diagram, decode() is called with ascii (which is the same as calling unicode() without an encoding given). As ASCII can't contain bytes greater than 0x7F, this will throw a UnicodeDecodeError exception:
The Unicode Sandwich
It's good practice to form a Unicode sandwich in your code, where you decode all incoming data to Unicode strings, work with Unicodes, then encode to strs on the way out. This saves you from worrying about the encoding of strings in the middle of your code.
Input / Decode
Source code
If you need to bake non-ASCII into your source code, just create Unicode strings by prefixing the string with a u. E.g.
u'Zürich'
To allow Python to decode your source code, you will need to add an encoding header to match the actual encoding of your file. For example, if your file was encoded as 'UTF-8', you would use:
# encoding: utf-8
This is only necessary when you have non-ASCII in your source code.
Files
Usually non-ASCII data is received from a file. The io module provides a TextWrapper that decodes your file on the fly, using a given encoding. You must use the correct encoding for the file - it can't be easily guessed. For example, for a UTF-8 file:
import io
with io.open("my_utf8_file.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8") as my_file:
my_unicode_string = my_file.read()
my_unicode_string would then be suitable for passing to Markdown. If a UnicodeDecodeError from the read() line, then you've probably used the wrong encoding value.
CSV Files
The Python 2.7 CSV module does not support non-ASCII characters 😩. Help is at hand, however, with https://pypi.python.org/pypi/backports.csv.
Use it like above but pass the opened file to it:
from backports import csv
import io
with io.open("my_utf8_file.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8") as my_file:
for row in csv.reader(my_file):
yield row
Databases
Most Python database drivers can return data in Unicode, but usually require a little configuration. Always use Unicode strings for SQL queries.
MySQL
In the connection string add:
charset='utf8',
use_unicode=True
E.g.
>>> db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost", user='root', passwd='passwd', db='sandbox', use_unicode=True, charset="utf8")
PostgreSQL
Add:
psycopg2.extensions.register_type(psycopg2.extensions.UNICODE)
psycopg2.extensions.register_type(psycopg2.extensions.UNICODEARRAY)
HTTP
Web pages can be encoded in just about any encoding. The Content-type header should contain a charset field to hint at the encoding. The content can then be decoded manually against this value. Alternatively, Python-Requests returns Unicodes in response.text.
Manually
If you must decode strings manually, you can simply do my_string.decode(encoding), where encoding is the appropriate encoding. Python 2.x supported codecs are given here: Standard Encodings. Again, if you get UnicodeDecodeError then you've probably got the wrong encoding.
The meat of the sandwich
Work with Unicodes as you would normal strs.
Output
stdout / printing
print writes through the stdout stream. Python tries to configure an encoder on stdout so that Unicodes are encoded to the console's encoding. For example, if a Linux shell's locale is en_GB.UTF-8, the output will be encoded to UTF-8. On Windows, you will be limited to an 8bit code page.
An incorrectly configured console, such as corrupt locale, can lead to unexpected print errors. PYTHONIOENCODING environment variable can force the encoding for stdout.
Files
Just like input, io.open can be used to transparently convert Unicodes to encoded byte strings.
Database
The same configuration for reading will allow Unicodes to be written directly.
Python 3
Python 3 is no more Unicode capable than Python 2.x is, however it is slightly less confused on the topic. E.g the regular str is now a Unicode string and the old str is now bytes.
The default encoding is UTF-8, so if you .decode() a byte string without giving an encoding, Python 3 uses UTF-8 encoding. This probably fixes 50% of people's Unicode problems.
Further, open() operates in text mode by default, so returns decoded str (Unicode ones). The encoding is derived from your locale, which tends to be UTF-8 on Un*x systems or an 8-bit code page, such as windows-1251, on Windows boxes.
Why you shouldn't use sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')
It's a nasty hack (there's a reason you have to use reload) that will only mask problems and hinder your migration to Python 3.x. Understand the problem, fix the root cause and enjoy Unicode zen.
See Why should we NOT use sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8") in a py script? for further details
Finally I got it:
as3:/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages# cat sitecustomize.py
# encoding=utf8
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')
Let me check:
as3:~/ngokevin-site# python
Python 2.7.6 (default, Dec 6 2013, 14:49:02)
[GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys
>>> reload(sys)
<module 'sys' (built-in)>
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'utf8'
>>>
The above shows the default encoding of python is utf8. Then the error is no more.
This is the classic "unicode issue". I believe that explaining this is beyond the scope of a StackOverflow answer to completely explain what is happening.
It is well explained here.
In very brief summary, you have passed something that is being interpreted as a string of bytes to something that needs to decode it into Unicode characters, but the default codec (ascii) is failing.
The presentation I pointed you to provides advice for avoiding this. Make your code a "unicode sandwich". In Python 2, the use of from __future__ import unicode_literals helps.
Update: how can the code be fixed:
OK - in your variable "source" you have some bytes. It is not clear from your question how they got in there - maybe you read them from a web form? In any case, they are not encoded with ascii, but python is trying to convert them to unicode assuming that they are. You need to explicitly tell it what the encoding is. This means that you need to know what the encoding is! That is not always easy, and it depends entirely on where this string came from. You could experiment with some common encodings - for example UTF-8. You tell unicode() the encoding as a second parameter:
source = unicode(source, 'utf-8')
In some cases, when you check your default encoding (print sys.getdefaultencoding()), it returns that you are using ASCII. If you change to UTF-8, it doesn't work, depending on the content of your variable.
I found another way:
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('Cp1252')
I was searching to solve the following error message:
unicodedecodeerror: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 5454: ordinal not in range(128)
I finally got it fixed by specifying 'encoding':
f = open('../glove/glove.6B.100d.txt', encoding="utf-8")
Wish it could help you too.
"UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte"
Cause of this error: input_string must be unicode but str was given
"TypeError: Decoding Unicode is not supported"
Cause of this error: trying to convert unicode input_string into unicode
So first check that your input_string is str and convert to unicode if necessary:
if isinstance(input_string, str):
input_string = unicode(input_string, 'utf-8')
Secondly, the above just changes the type but does not remove non ascii characters. If you want to remove non-ascii characters:
if isinstance(input_string, str):
input_string = input_string.decode('ascii', 'ignore').encode('ascii') #note: this removes the character and encodes back to string.
elif isinstance(input_string, unicode):
input_string = input_string.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
In order to resolve this on an operating system level in an Ubuntu installation check the following:
$ locale charmap
If you get
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
instead of
UTF-8
then set LC_CTYPE and LC_ALL like this:
$ export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
$ export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
I find the best is to always convert to unicode - but this is difficult to achieve because in practice you'd have to check and convert every argument to every function and method you ever write that includes some form of string processing.
So I came up with the following approach to either guarantee unicodes or byte strings, from either input. In short, include and use the following lambdas:
# guarantee unicode string
_u = lambda t: t.decode('UTF-8', 'replace') if isinstance(t, str) else t
_uu = lambda *tt: tuple(_u(t) for t in tt)
# guarantee byte string in UTF8 encoding
_u8 = lambda t: t.encode('UTF-8', 'replace') if isinstance(t, unicode) else t
_uu8 = lambda *tt: tuple(_u8(t) for t in tt)
Examples:
text='Some string with codes > 127, like Zürich'
utext=u'Some string with codes > 127, like Zürich'
print "==> with _u, _uu"
print _u(text), type(_u(text))
print _u(utext), type(_u(utext))
print _uu(text, utext), type(_uu(text, utext))
print "==> with u8, uu8"
print _u8(text), type(_u8(text))
print _u8(utext), type(_u8(utext))
print _uu8(text, utext), type(_uu8(text, utext))
# with % formatting, always use _u() and _uu()
print "Some unknown input %s" % _u(text)
print "Multiple inputs %s, %s" % _uu(text, text)
# but with string.format be sure to always work with unicode strings
print u"Also works with formats: {}".format(_u(text))
print u"Also works with formats: {},{}".format(*_uu(text, text))
# ... or use _u8 and _uu8, because string.format expects byte strings
print "Also works with formats: {}".format(_u8(text))
print "Also works with formats: {},{}".format(*_uu8(text, text))
Here's some more reasoning about this.
Got a same error and this solved my error. Thanks!
python 2 and python 3 differing in unicode handling is making pickled files quite incompatible to load. So Use python pickle's encoding argument. Link below helped me solve the similar problem when I was trying to open pickled data from my python 3.7, while my file was saved originally in python 2.x version.
https://blog.modest-destiny.com/posts/python-2-and-3-compatible-pickle-save-and-load/
I copy the load_pickle function in my script and called the load_pickle(pickle_file) while loading my input_data like this:
input_data = load_pickle("my_dataset.pkl")
The load_pickle function is here:
def load_pickle(pickle_file):
try:
with open(pickle_file, 'rb') as f:
pickle_data = pickle.load(f)
except UnicodeDecodeError as e:
with open(pickle_file, 'rb') as f:
pickle_data = pickle.load(f, encoding='latin1')
except Exception as e:
print('Unable to load data ', pickle_file, ':', e)
raise
return pickle_data
Encode converts a unicode object in to a string object. I think you are trying to encode a string object. first convert your result into unicode object and then encode that unicode object into 'utf-8'.
for example
result = yourFunction()
result.decode().encode('utf-8')
This worked for me:
file = open('docs/my_messy_doc.pdf', 'rb')
I had the same error, with URLs containing non-ascii chars (bytes with values > 128), my solution:
url = url.decode('utf8').encode('utf-8')
Note: utf-8, utf8 are simply aliases . Using only 'utf8' or 'utf-8' should work in the same way
In my case, worked for me, in Python 2.7, I suppose this assignment changed 'something' in the str internal representation--i.e., it forces the right decoding of the backed byte sequence in url and finally puts the string into a utf-8 str with all the magic in the right place.
Unicode in Python is black magic for me.
Hope useful
I had the same problem but it didn't work for Python 3. I followed this and it solved my problem:
enc = sys.getdefaultencoding()
file = open(menu, "r", encoding = enc)
You have to set the encoding when you are reading/writing the file.
I got the same problem with the string "PastelerÃa Mallorca" and I solved with:
unicode("PastelerÃa Mallorca", 'latin-1')
In short, to ensure proper unicode handling in Python 2:
use io.open for reading/writing files
use from __future__ import unicode_literals
configure other data inputs/outputs (e.g., databases, network) to use unicode
if you cannot configure outputs to utf-8, convert your output for them print(text.encode('ascii', 'replace').decode())
For explanations, see #Alastair McCormack's detailed answer.
In a Django (1.9.10)/Python 2.7.5 project I have frequent UnicodeDecodeError exceptions; mainly when I try to feed unicode strings to logging. I made a helper function for arbitrary objects to basically format to 8-bit ascii strings and replacing any characters not in the table to '?'. I think it's not the best solution but since the default encoding is ascii (and i don't want to change it) it will do:
def encode_for_logging(c, encoding='ascii'):
if isinstance(c, basestring):
return c.encode(encoding, 'replace')
elif isinstance(c, Iterable):
c_ = []
for v in c:
c_.append(encode_for_logging(v, encoding))
return c_
else:
return encode_for_logging(unicode(c))
`
This error occurs when there are some non ASCII characters in our string and we are performing any operations on that string without proper decoding.
This helped me solve my problem.
I am reading a CSV file with columns ID,Text and decoding characters in it as below:
train_df = pd.read_csv("Example.csv")
train_data = train_df.values
for i in train_data:
print("ID :" + i[0])
text = i[1].decode("utf-8",errors="ignore").strip().lower()
print("Text: " + text)
Here is my solution, just add the encoding.
with open(file, encoding='utf8') as f
And because reading glove file will take a long time, I recommend to the glove file to a numpy file. When netx time you read the embedding weights, it will save your time.
import numpy as np
from tqdm import tqdm
def load_glove(file):
"""Loads GloVe vectors in numpy array.
Args:
file (str): a path to a glove file.
Return:
dict: a dict of numpy arrays.
"""
embeddings_index = {}
with open(file, encoding='utf8') as f:
for i, line in tqdm(enumerate(f)):
values = line.split()
word = ''.join(values[:-300])
coefs = np.asarray(values[-300:], dtype='float32')
embeddings_index[word] = coefs
return embeddings_index
# EMBEDDING_PATH = '../embedding_weights/glove.840B.300d.txt'
EMBEDDING_PATH = 'glove.840B.300d.txt'
embeddings = load_glove(EMBEDDING_PATH)
np.save('glove_embeddings.npy', embeddings)
Gist link: https://gist.github.com/BrambleXu/634a844cdd3cd04bb2e3ba3c83aef227
Specify: # encoding= utf-8 at the top of your Python File, It should fix the issue
I experienced this error with Python2.7. It happened to me while trying to run many python programs, but I managed to reproduce it with this simple script:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import subprocess
import sys
result = subprocess.Popen([u'svn', u'info'])
if not callable(getattr(result, "__enter__", None)) and not callable(getattr(result, "__exit__", None)):
print("foo")
print("bar")
On success, it should print out 'foo' and 'bar', and probably an error message if you're not in a svn folder.
On failure, it should print 'UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc4 in position 39: ordinal not in range(128)'.
After trying to regenerate my locales and many other solutions posted in this question, I learned the error was happening because I had a special character (ĺ) encoded in my PATH environment variable. After fixing the PATH in '~/.bashrc', and exiting my session and entering again, (apparently sourcing '~/.bashrc' didn't work), the issue was gone.
Using Python 3.4.2, I want to get a part of a website. According to the meta tags, that website is encoded with iso-8859-1. And I want to write one part (along with other parts) to a CSV file.
However, this part contains an undefined character with the hex value 0x8b. In order to preserve the part as good as possible, I want to write it as is into the CSV file. However, Python doesn't let me do it.
Here's a minimal example:
import urllib.request
import urllib.parse
import csv
if __name__ == "__main__":
with open("bytewrite.csv", "w", newline="") as csvfile:
a = b'\x8b' # byte literal by urllib.request
b = a.decode("iso-8859-1")
w = csv.writer(csvfile)
w.writerow([b])
And this is the output:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "D:\Eigene\Dateien\Code\Python\writebyte.py", line 12, in <module>
w.writerow([b])
File "C:\Python34\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 '\x8b' in position 0: character maps to <undefined>
Eventually, I did it manually. It was just copy and paste with Notepad++, and according to a hex editor the value was inserted correctly. But how can I do it with Python 3? Why does Python even care what 0x8b stands for, instead of just writing it to the file?
It further irritates me that according to iso8859_1.py (and also cp1252.py) in C:\Python34\lib\encodings\ the lookup table seems to not interfere:
# iso8859_1.py
'\x8b' # 0x8B -> <control>
# cp1252.py
'\u2039' # 0x8B -> SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
Quoted from csv docs:
Since open() is used to open a CSV file for reading, the file will by
default be decoded into unicode using the system default encoding (see
locale.getpreferredencoding()). To decode a file using a different
encoding, use the encoding argument of open:
import csv
with open('some.csv', newline='', encoding='utf-8') as f:
reader = csv.reader(f)
for row in reader:
print(row)
The same applies to writing in something other than the system default encoding: specify the encoding argument when opening the output file.
What is happening is you've decoded to Unicode from iso-8859-1, but getpreferredencoding() returns cp1252 and the Unicode character \x8b is not supported in that encoding.
Corrected minimal example:
import csv
with open('bytewrite.csv', 'w', encoding='iso-8859-1', newline='') as csvfile:
a = b'\x8b'
b = a.decode("iso-8859-1")
w = csv.writer(csvfile)
w.writerow([b])
Your interpretation of the lookup tables in encodings is not correct. The code you've listed:
# iso8859_1.py
'\x8b' # 0x8B -> <control>
# cp1252.py
'\u2039' # 0x8B -> SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
Tells you two things:
How to map the unicode character '\x8b' to bytes in iso8859-1, it's just a control character.
How to map the unicode character '\u2039' to bytes in cp1252, it's a piece of punctuation: ‹
This does not tell you how to map the unicode character '\x8b' to bytes in cp1252, which is what you're trying to do.
The root of the problem is that "\x8b" is not a valid iso8859-1 character. Look at the table here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1#Codepage_layout
8b is undefined, so it just decodes as a control character. After it's decoded and we're in unicode land, what is 0x8b? This is a little tricky to find out, but it's defined in the unicode database here:
008B;<control>;Cc;0;BN;;;;;N;PARTIAL LINE FORWARD;;;;
Now, does CP1252 have this control character, "PARTIAL LINE FORWARD"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252#Code_page_layout
No, it does not. So you get an error when trying to encode it in CP1252.
Unfortunately there's no good solution for this. Some ideas:
Guess what encoding the page actually is. It's probably CP1252, not ISO-8859-1, but who knows. It could even contain a mix of encodings, or incorrectly encoded data (mojibake). You can use chardet to guess the encoding, or force this URL to use CP1252 in your program (overriding what the meta tag says), or you could try a series of codecs and take the first one that decodes & encodes successfully.
Fix up the input text or the decoded unicode string using some kind of mapping of problematic characters like this. This will work most of the time, but will fail silently or do something weird if you're trying to "fix up" data where it doesn't make sense.
Do not try to convert from ISO-8859-1 to CP1252, as they aren't compatible with each other. If you use UTF-8 that might work better.
Use an encoding error handler. See this table for a list of handlers. Using xmlcharrefreplace and backslashreplace will preserve the information (but then require you to do extra steps when decoding), while replace and ignore will silently skip over the bad character.
These types of issues caused by older encodings are really hard to solve, and there is no perfect solution. This is the reason why unicode was invented.
I have a log file that I need to go through line by line, and apparently it contains some "bad bytes". I get an error message along the following lines:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xb0 in position 9: invalid start byte
I have been able to strip down the problem to a file "log.test" containing the following line:
Message: \260
(At least this is how it shows up in my Emacs.)
I have a file "demo_error.py" which looks like this:
import sys
with open(sys.argv[1], 'r') as lf:
for i, l in enumerate(lf):
print(i, l.strip())
I then run, from the command line:
$ python3 demo_error.py log.test
The full traceback is:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "demo_error.py", line 5, in <module>
for i, l in enumerate(lf):
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python3/3.4.0/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.4/lib/python3.4/codecs.py", line 313, in decode
(result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xb0 in position 13: invalid start byte
My hunch is that I have to somehow specify a more general codec ("raw ascii" for instance) - but I'm not quite sure how to do this.
Note that this is not really a problem in Python 2.7.
And just to make my point clear: I don't mind getting an exception for the line in question - then I can simply discard the line. The problem is that the exception seems to happen on the "for" loop itself, which makes special handling of that particular line impossible.
You can also use the codecs module. When you use the codecs.open() function, you can specify how it handles errors using the errors argument:
codecs.open(filename, mode[, encoding[, errors[, buffering]]])
The errors argument can be one of several different keywords that specify how you want Python to behave when it attempts to decode a character that is invalid for the current encoding. You'll probably be most interested in codecs.ignore_errors or codecs.replace_errors, which cause invalid characters to be either ignored or replaced with a default character, respectively.
This method can be a good alternative when you know you have corrupt data that will cause the UnicodeDecodeError to be raised even when you specify the correct encoding.
Example:
with codecs.open('file.txt', mode='r', errors='ignore'):
# ...stuff...
# Even if there is corrupt data and invalid characters for the default
# encoding, this open() will still succeed
So apparently your file does not contain valid UTF-8 (which is the default encoding).
If you know, what encoding is used (e.g. iso-8859-1 which was afaik the python2 default), you can specify it when opening by using
open(sys.argv[1], mode='r', encoding='iso-8859-1')
If the encoding is unknown or not valid as all, you can open the file as binary.
open(sys.argv[1], mode='rb')
This will make the content accessible as bytes rather than trying to interpret them as characters.
In python <=2.7, strings (str) are arrays of 8 bits characters. So when reading a file composed of 8 bits characters or bytes, you get the bytes without problem, no matter what the actual encoding is. Simply, you may read them with a wrong representation, but it will never throw any exception.
In python >=3,strings are unicode strings (16 bits per character). So when reading a file python has to decode the file, and by default it uses system encoding - not necessarily UTF-8. In your case, it seems to assume UTF-8 encoding, when your log file is not UTF-8 encoding so the exception.
If not sure of the encoding you may reasonably try to use ISO-8859-1 with
open(sys.argv[1], 'r', encoding='iso-8859-1')
I found a list of the majority of English words online, but the line breaks are of unix-style (encoded in Unicode: UTF-8). I found it on this website: http://dreamsteep.com/projects/the-english-open-word-list.html
How do I convert the line breaks to CRLF so I can iterate over them? The program I will be using them in goes through each line in the file, so the words have to be one per line.
This is a portion of the file: bitbackbitebackbiterbackbitersbackbitesbackbitingbackbittenbackboard
It should be:
bit
backbite
backbiter
backbiters
backbites
backbiting
backbitten
backboard
How can I convert my files to this type? Note: it's 26 files (one per letter) with 80,000 words or so in total (so the program should be very fast).
I don't know where to start because I've never worked with unicode. Thanks in advance!
Using rU as the parameter (as suggested), with this in my code:
with open(my_file_name, 'rU') as my_file:
for line in my_file:
new_words.append(str(line))
my_file.close()
I get this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#5>", line 1, in <module>
addWords('B Words')
File "D:\my_stuff\Google Drive\documents\SCHOOL\Programming\Python\Programming Class\hangman.py", line 138, in addWords
for line in my_file:
File "C:\Python3.3\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 0x8d in position 7488: character maps to <undefined>
Can anyone help me with this?
Instead of converting, you should be able to just open the file using Python's universal newline support:
f = open('words.txt', 'rU')
(Note the U.)
You can use the replace method of strings. Like
txt.replace('\n', '\r\n')
EDIT :
in your case :
with open('input.txt') as inp, open('output.txt', 'w') as out:
txt = inp.read()
txt = txt.replace('\n', '\r\n')
out.write(txt)
You don't need to convert the line endings in the files in order to be able to iterate over them. As suggested by NPE, simply use python's universal newlines mode.
The UnicodeDecodeError happens because the files you are processing are encoded as UTF-8 and when you attempt to decode the contents from bytes to a string, via str(line), Python is using the cp1252 encoding to convert the bytes read from the file into a Python 3 string (i.e. a sequence of unicode code points). However, there are bytes in those files that cannot be decoded with the cp1252 encoding and that causes a UnicodeDecodeError.
If you change str(line) to line.decode('utf-8') you should no longer get the UnicodeDecodeError. Check out the Text Vs. Data Instead of Unicode Vs. 8-bit writeup for some more details.
Finally, you might also find The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky useful.
You can use cereja package
pip install cereja==1.2.0
import cereja cereja.lf_to_crlf(dir_or_file_path)
or
cereja.lf_to_crlf(dir_or_file_path, ext_in=[“.py”,”.csv”])
You can substitute for any standard. See the filetools module