I'm writing a little Python script that parses word docs and writes to a csv file. However, some of the docs have some utf-8 characters that my script can't process correctly.
Fancy quotes show up quite often (u'\u201c'). Is there a quick and easy (and smart) way of replacing those with the neutral ascii-supported quotes, so I can just write line.encode('ascii') to the csv file?
I have tried to find the left quote and replace it:
val = line.find(u'\u201c')
if val >= 0: line[val] = '"'
But to no avail:
TypeError: 'unicode' object does not support item assignment
Is what I've described a good strategy? Or should I just set up the csv to support utf-8 (though I'm not sure if the application that will be reading the CSV wants utf-8)?
Thank you
You can use the Unidecode package to automatically convert all Unicode characters to their nearest pure ASCII equivalent.
from unidecode import unidecode
line = unidecode(line)
This will handle both directions of double quotes as well as single quotes, em dashes, and other things that you probably haven't discovered yet.
Edit: a comment points out if your language isn't English, you may find ASCII to be too restrictive. Here's an adaptation of the above code that uses a whitelist to indicate characters that shouldn't be converted.
>>> from unidecode import unidecode
>>> whitelist = set('µÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýþÿ')
>>> line = '\u201cRésumé\u201d'
>>> print(line)
“Résumé”
>>> line = ''.join(c if c in whitelist else unidecode(c) for c in line)
>>> print(line)
"Résumé"
You can't assign to a string, as they are immutable, and can't be changed.
You can, however, just use the regex library, which might be the most flexible way to do this:
import re
newline = re.sub(u'\u201c','"',line)
I'm writing a little Python script that parses word docs and writes to a csv file. However, some of the docs have some utf-8 characters that my script can't process correctly.
Fancy quotes show up quite often (u'\u201c'). Is there a quick and easy (and smart) way of replacing those with the neutral ascii-supported quotes, so I can just write line.encode('ascii') to the csv file?
I have tried to find the left quote and replace it:
val = line.find(u'\u201c')
if val >= 0: line[val] = '"'
But to no avail:
TypeError: 'unicode' object does not support item assignment
Is what I've described a good strategy? Or should I just set up the csv to support utf-8 (though I'm not sure if the application that will be reading the CSV wants utf-8)?
Thank you
You can use the Unidecode package to automatically convert all Unicode characters to their nearest pure ASCII equivalent.
from unidecode import unidecode
line = unidecode(line)
This will handle both directions of double quotes as well as single quotes, em dashes, and other things that you probably haven't discovered yet.
Edit: a comment points out if your language isn't English, you may find ASCII to be too restrictive. Here's an adaptation of the above code that uses a whitelist to indicate characters that shouldn't be converted.
>>> from unidecode import unidecode
>>> whitelist = set('µÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýþÿ')
>>> line = '\u201cRésumé\u201d'
>>> print(line)
“Résumé”
>>> line = ''.join(c if c in whitelist else unidecode(c) for c in line)
>>> print(line)
"Résumé"
You can't assign to a string, as they are immutable, and can't be changed.
You can, however, just use the regex library, which might be the most flexible way to do this:
import re
newline = re.sub(u'\u201c','"',line)
I know similar questions have been asked a million times, but despite reading through many of them I can't find a solution that applies to my situation.
I have a django application, in which I've created a management script. This script reads some text files, and outputs them to the terminal (it will do more useful stuff with the contents later, but I'm still testing it out) and the characters come out with escape sequences like \xc3\xa5 instead of the intended å. Since that escape sequence means Ã¥, which is a common misinterpretation of å because of encoding problems, I suspect there are at least two places where this is going wrong. However, I can't figure out where - I've checked all the possible culprits I can think of:
The terminal encoding is UTF-8; echo $LANG gives en_US.UTF-8
The text files are encoded in UTF-8; file * in the directory where they reside results in all entries being listed as "UTF-8 Unicode text" except one, which does not contain any non-ASCII characters and is listed as "ASCII text". Running iconv -f ascii -t utf8 thefile.txt > utf8.txt on that file yields another file with ASCII text encoding.
The Python scripts are all UTF-8 (or, in several cases, ASCII with no non-ASCII characters). I tried inserting a comment in my management script with some special characters to force it to save as UTF-8, but it did not change the behavior. The above observations on the text files apply on all Python script files as well.
The Python script that handles the text files has # -*- encoding: utf-8 -*- at the top; the only line preceding that is #!/usr/bin/python3, but I've tried both changing to .../python for Python 2.7 or removing it entirely to leave it up to Django, without results.
According to the documentation, "Django natively supports Unicode data", so I "can safely pass around Unicode strings" anywhere in the application.
I really can't think of anywhere else to look for a non-UTF-8 link in the chain. Where could I possibly have missed a setting to change to UTF-8?
For completeness: I'm reading from the files with lines = file.readlines() and printing with the standard print() function. No manual encoding or decoding happens at either end.
UPDATE:
In response to quiestions in comments:
print(sys.getdefaultencoding(), sys.stdout.encoding, f.encoding) yields ('ascii', 'UTF-8', None) for all files.
I started compiling an SSCCE, and quickly found that the problem is only there if I try to print the value in a tuple. In other words, print(lines[0].strip()) works fine, but print(lines[0].strip(), lines[1].strip()) does not. Adding .decode('utf-8') yields a tuple where both strings are marked with a prepending u and \xe5 (the correct escape sequence for å) instead of the odd characters before - but I can't figure out how to print them as regular strings, with no escape characters. I've tested another call to .decode('utf-8') as well as wrapping in str() but both fail with UnicodeEncodeError complaining that \xe5 can't be encoded in ascii. Since a single string works correctly, I don't know what else to test.
SSCCE:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import os, sys
for root,dirs,files in os.walk('txt-songs'):
for filename in files:
with open(os.path.join(root,filename)) as f:
print(sys.getdefaultencoding(), sys.stdout.encoding, f.encoding)
lines = f.readlines()
print(lines[0].strip()) # works
print(lines[0].strip(), lines[1].strip()) # does not work
The big problem here is that you're mixing up Python 2 and Python 3. In particular, you've written Python 3 code, and you're trying to run it in Python 2.7. But there are a few other problems along the way. So, let me try to explain everything that's going wrong.
I started compiling an SSCCE, and quickly found that the problem is only there if I try to print the value in a tuple. In other words, print(lines[0].strip()) works fine, but print(lines[0].strip(), lines[1].strip()) does not.
The first problem here is that the str of a tuple (or any other collection) includes the repr, not the str, of its elements. The simple way to solve this problem is to not print collections. In this case, there is really no reason to print a tuple at all; the only reason you have one is that you've built it for printing. Just do something like this:
print '({}, {})'.format(lines[0].strip(), lines[1].strip())
In cases where you already have a collection in a variable, and you want to print out the str of each element, you have to do that explicitly. You can print the repr of the str of each with this:
print tuple(map(str, my_tuple))
… or print the str of each directly with this:
print '({})'.format(', '.join(map(str, my_tuple)))
Notice that I'm using Python 2 syntax above. That's because if you actually used Python 3, there would be no tuple in the first place, and there would also be no need to call str.
You've got a Unicode string. In Python 3, unicode and str are the same type. But in Python 2, it's bytes and str that are the same type, and unicode is a different one. So, in 2.x, you don't have a str yet, which is why you need to call str.
And Python 2 is also why print(lines[0].strip(), lines[1].strip()) prints a tuple. In Python 3, that's a call to the print function with two strings as arguments, so it will print out two strings separated by a space. In Python 2, it's a print statement with one argument, which is a tuple.
If you want to write code that works the same in both 2.x and 3.x, you either need to avoid ever printing more than one argument, or use a wrapper like six.print_, or do a from __future__ import print_function, or be very careful to do ugly things like adding in extra parentheses to make sure your tuples are tuples in both versions.
So, in 3.x, you've got str objects and you just print them out. In 2.x, you've got unicode objects, and you're printing out their repr. You can change that to print out their str, or to avoid printing a tuple in the first place… but that still won't help anything.
Why? Well, printing anything, in either version, just calls str on it and then passes it to sys.stdio.write. But in 3.x, str means unicode, and sys.stdio is a TextIOWrapper; in 2.x, str means bytes, and sys.stdio is a binary file.
So, the pseudocode for what ultimately happens is:
sys.stdio.wrapped_binary_file.write(s.encode(sys.stdio.encoding, sys.stdio.errors))
sys.stdio.write(s.encode(sys.getdefaultencoding()))
And, as you saw, those will do different things, because:
print(sys.getdefaultencoding(), sys.stdout.encoding, f.encoding) yields ('ascii', 'UTF-8', None)
You can simulate Python 3 here by using a io.TextIOWrapper or codecs.StreamWriter and then using print >>f, … or f.write(…) instead of print, or you can explicitly encode all your unicode objects like this:
print '({})'.format(', '.join(element.encode('utf-8') for element in my_tuple)))
But really, the best way to deal with all of these problems is to run your existing Python 3 code in a Python 3 interpreter instead of a Python 2 interpreter.
If you want or need to use Python 2.7, that's fine, but you have to write Python 2 code. If you want to write Python 3 code, that's great, but you have to run Python 3.3. If you really want to write code that works properly in both, you can, but it's extra work, and takes a lot more knowledge.
For further details, see What's New In Python 3.0 (the "Print Is A Function" and "Text Vs. Data Instead Of Unicode Vs. 8-bit" sections), although that's written from the point of view of explaining 3.x to 2.x users, which is backward from what you need. The 3.x and 2.x versions of the Unicode HOWTO may also help.
For completeness: I'm reading from the files with lines = file.readlines() and printing with the standard print() function. No manual encoding or decoding happens at either end.
In Python 3.x, the standard print function just writes Unicode to sys.stdout. Since that's a io.TextIOWrapper, its write method is equivalent to this:
self.wrapped_binary_file.write(s.encode(self.encoding, self.errors))
So one likely problem is that sys.stdout.encoding does not match your terminal's actual encoding.
And of course another is that your shell's encoding does not match your terminal window's encoding.
For example, on OS X, I create a myscript.py like this:
print('\u00e5')
Then I fire up Terminal.app, create a session profile with encoding "Western (ISO Latin 1)", create a tab with that session profile, and do this:
$ export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
$ python3 myscript.py
… and I get exactly the behavior you're seeing.
It seems from your comment that you are using python-2 and not python-3.
If you are using python-3, it's worth reading the unicode howto guide on reading/writing to understand what python is doing.
The basic flow if encoding is:
DECODE from encoding to unicode -> Processing -> Encode from unicode to encoding
In python3 the bytes are decoded to strings and strings are encoded to bytes.
The bytes to string decoding is handled for you with open().
[..] the built-in open() function can return a file-like object that
assumes the file’s contents are in a specified encoding and accepts
Unicode parameters for methods such as read() and write(). This works
through open()‘s encoding and errors parameters [..]
So to read in unicode from a utf-8 encoded file you should be doing this:
# python-3
with open('utf8.txt', mode='r', encoding='utf-8') as f:
lines = f.readlines() # returns unicode
If you want similar functionality using python-2, you can use codecs.open():
# python-2
import codecs
with codecs.open('utf8.txt', mode='r', encoding='utf-8') as f:
lines = f.readlines() # returns unicode
i'm trying to store a string and after tokenize it with nltk in python.But i cant understand why after tokenizing it ( it creates a list ) i cant see the strings in list..
Can anyone help me plz?
Here is the code:
#a="Γεια σου"
#b=nltk.word_tokenize(a)
#b
['\xc3\xe5\xe9\xe1', '\xf3\xef\xf5']
I just want to be able to see the content of the list regularly..
Thx in advance
You are using Python 2, where unprefixed quotes denote a byte as opposed to a character string (if you're not sure about the difference, read this). Either switch to Python 3, where this has been fixed, or prefix all character strings with u and print the strings (as opposed to showing their repr, which differs in Python 2.x):
>>> import nltk
>>> a = u'Γεια σου'
>>> b = nltk.word_tokenize(a)
>>> print(u'\n'.join(b))
Γεια
σου
You can see the strings. The characters are represented by escape sequences because of your terminal encoding settings. Configure your terminal to accept input, and present output, in UTF-8.
when I run my programs from within Eclipse IDE the following piece of code works perfectly:
address_name = self.text_ctrl_address.GetValue().encode('utf-8')
self.address_list = [i for i in data if address_name.upper() in i[5].upper().encode('utf-8')]
but when running the same piece of code directly with python, I get an "UnicodeDecodeError".
What does the IDE does differently that it doesn't fall on this error ?
ps: I encode both unicode strings because it is the only way to test one string against another containing letters like ñ or ç.
Edit:
Sorry, I should have given more details: This piece of code belongs to a dialog built with WxPython. The GetValue() functions gets texts from a line edit widget and try to match this piece of text against a database. The program runs on Windows (and because of this, maybe michael Shopsin above might be right("Win-1252 to UTF-8 is a serious nuisance"). I've read many times that I should always work with unicode, avoid encoding, but if I don't encode, certain string methods don't seem to work very well depending on the characters in a word (I am in Spain, so lots of non ascii characters). By directly I meant "double clicking" the file it self, and not running from within the IDE.
UnicodeDecodeError indicates that the error happens during decoding of a bytestring into Unicode.
In particular, it may happen if you try to encode a bytestring instead of Unicode string on Python 2:
>>> u"\N{EM DASH}".encode('utf-8').encode('utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
u"\N{EM DASH}".encode('utf-8') is a bytestring and invoking .encode('utf-8') the 2nd time leads to implicit .decode(sys.getdefaultencoding()) that leads to the UnicodeDecodeError.
What does the IDE does differently that it doesn't fall on this error ?
It probably works in IDE because it changes sys.getdefaultencoding() to utf-8 that you should not do. It may hide bugs as your question demonstrates. In general, it may also break 3rd-party libraries that do not expect non-ascii sys.getdefaultencoding() on Python 2.
I encode both unicode strings because it is the only way to test one string against another containing letters like ñ or ç.
You should use unicodedata.normalize() instead:
>>> import unicodedata
>>> a, b = u'\xf1', u'n\u0303'
>>> print(a)
ñ
>>> print(b)
ñ
>>> a == unicodedata.normalize('NFC', b)
True
Note: the code in your question may produce surprising results:
#XXX BROKEN, DON'T DO IT
...address_name.upper() in i[5].upper().encode('utf-8')...
address_name.upper() calls bytes.upper method while i[5].upper() calls unicode.upper method. The former does not support Unicode and it may depend on the current locale, the latter is better but to perform case-insensitive comparison, use .casefold() method instead:
key = unicode_address_name.casefold()
... if key == i[5].casefold()...
In general, If you need to sort unicode strings then you could use icu.Collator. Compare the default lexicographical sort:
>>> L = [u'sandwiches', u'angel delight', u'custard', u'éclairs', u'glühwein']
>>> sorted(L)
[u'angel delight', u'custard', u'gl\xfchwein', u'sandwiches', u'\xe9clairs']
with the order in en_GB locale:
>>> import icu # PyICU
>>> collator = icu.Collator.createInstance(icu.Locale('en_GB'))
>>> sorted(L, key=collator.getSortKey)
[u'angel delight', u'custard', u'\xe9clairs', u'gl\xfchwein', u'sandwiches']
I could solve the problem changing the encoding from UTF-8 to cp1252 (Windows western europe). Apparently UTF-8 could not encode some Windows characters. Thanks to Michael Shopsin above for the insight.
The program runs on windows and uses WxPython dialog , getting values from a line edit widget and matching the string against a database.
Thank you all for the attention, and I hope this post can help people in the future with a similar problem.