I'm attempting to do something very simple, which is read a file in ascii or utf-8-sig and save it as utf-8. However, when I run the function below, and then do file filename.json in linux, it always shows the file as being ASCII. I have tried using codecs, and no luck either. The only way I can get it to work, is if I replace utf-8 with utf-8-sig, BUT that gives me the issue that the file has BOM endings. I've searched around for solutions, and I found some removing the beginning characters, however, after this is performed, the file becomes ascii again. I have tried everything her: Convert UTF-8 with BOM to UTF-8 with no BOM in Python
def file_converter(file_path):
s = open(file_path, mode='r', encoding='ascii').read()
open(file_path, mode='w', encoding='utf-8').write(s)
Files that only contain characters below U+0080 encode to exactly the same bytes as either ASCII or UTF-8 (this was one of the compatibility goals of UTF-8). file detects the file as ASCII, and it is, but it's also UTF-8, and will decode correctly as UTF-8 (just like any ASCII file will). So nothing at all is wrong.
I have to process an input text file, which can be in ANSI and convert it to UTF8, whilst doing doing some processing of the lines read. In python, that'll amount to
with open(input_file_location, 'r', newline='\r\n', encoding='cp1252') as old, open(output_file_location, 'w', encoding='utf_8') as new:
for line in old:
modified = ... do processing here ....
new.write(modified)
However, this will work as expected only if the input file is ANSI (windows). If however, the input file was UTF8 originally, the above code works silently, reading it assuming ANSI and thus things in output are not as expected.
So - question is - how to handle the scenario if existing file was already UTF8, so either read it as UTF8, or better, avoid the whole of above processing.
Thanks
So - question is - how to handle the scenario if existing file was already UTF8, so either read it as UTF8, or better, avoid the whole of above processing.
UTF8 is more constraining than CP1252, and both are ascii compatible. So you can start by reading it as UTF8, if that works you're fine (it's either plain ASCII or valid UTF-8), if that does not fall back to CP1252.
Alternatively you could try running chardet on it, but that's not necessarily more reliable: every byte is "valid" in ISO-8859 encodings (of which CP1252 is a derivative), so every file "decodes properly", they just return garbage.
There isn't a guaranteed way to determine the encoding a file if it isn't known in advance. However if you are sure that the possibilities are restricted to UTF-8 and cp1252, then the following approach may work:
Open the file in binary mode and read the first three bytes. If these bytes are b'\xef\xbb\xbf' then the encoding is extremely likely to be 'utf-8-sig', a Microsoft variant of UTF-8 (unless you have cp1252 files that legitimately begin with "''"). See the final paragraph of this section of the codecs docs.
Assume UTF-8. Both UTF-8 and cp1252 will decode bytes in the ASCII range (0-127) identically. Single bytes with the high bit set are not valid UTF-8, so if the file is encoded as cp1252 and contains such bytes a UnicodeDecodeError will be raised.
Catch the above UnicodeDecodeError and try again with cp1252.
Using python to pick it some pieces so definitely a noob ? here but didn't seeing a satisfactory answer.
I have a json utf-8 file with some pieces that have grave's, accute's etc.... I'm using codecs and have (for example):
str=codecs.open('../../publish_scripts/locations.json', 'r','utf-8')
locations=json.load(str)
for location in locations:
print location['name']
For print'ing, does anything special need to be done? It's giving me the following
ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 5
It looks like the correct utf-8 value for e-accute. I suspect I'm doing something wrong with print'ing. Would the iteration cause it to lose it's utf-8'ness?
PHP and Ruby versions handle the utf-8 piece fine; is there some looseness in those languages that python won't do?
thx
codec.open() will decode the contents of the file using the codec you supplied (utf-8). You then have a python unicode object (which behaves similarly to a string object).
Printing a unicode object will cause an implict (behind-the-scenes) encode using the default codec, which is usually ascii. If ascii cannot encode all of the characters present it will fail.
To print it, you should first encode it, thus:
for location in locations:
print location['name'].encode('utf8')
EDIT:
For your info, json.load() actually takes a file-like object (which is what codecs.open() returns). What you have at that point is neither a string nor a unicode object, but an iterable wrapper around the file.
By default json.load() expects the file to be utf8 encoded so your code snippet can be simplified:
locations = json.load(open('../../publish_scripts/locations.json'))
for location in locations:
print location['name'].encode('utf8')
You're probably reading the file correctly. The error occurs when you're printing. Python tries to convert the unicode string to ascii, and fails on the character in position 5.
Try this instead:
print location['name'].encode('utf-8')
If your terminal is set to expect output in utf-8 format, this will print correctly.
It's the same as in PHP. UTF8 strings are good to print.
The standard io streams are broken for non-ascii, character io in python2 and some site.py setups. Basically, you need to sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8') (or whatever the system locale's encoding is) very early in your script. With the site.py shipped in ubuntu, you need to imp.reload(sys) to make sys.setdefaultencoding available. Alternatively, you can wrap sys.stdout (and stdin and stderr) to be unicode-aware readers/writers, which you can get from codecs.getreader / getwriter.
I'm having some brain failure in understanding reading and writing text to a file (Python 2.4).
# The string, which has an a-acute in it.
ss = u'Capit\xe1n'
ss8 = ss.encode('utf8')
repr(ss), repr(ss8)
("u'Capit\xe1n'", "'Capit\xc3\xa1n'")
print ss, ss8
print >> open('f1','w'), ss8
>>> file('f1').read()
'Capit\xc3\xa1n\n'
So I type in Capit\xc3\xa1n into my favorite editor, in file f2.
Then:
>>> open('f1').read()
'Capit\xc3\xa1n\n'
>>> open('f2').read()
'Capit\\xc3\\xa1n\n'
>>> open('f1').read().decode('utf8')
u'Capit\xe1n\n'
>>> open('f2').read().decode('utf8')
u'Capit\\xc3\\xa1n\n'
What am I not understanding here? Clearly there is some vital bit of magic (or good sense) that I'm missing. What does one type into text files to get proper conversions?
What I'm truly failing to grok here, is what the point of the UTF-8 representation is, if you can't actually get Python to recognize it, when it comes from outside. Maybe I should just JSON dump the string, and use that instead, since that has an asciiable representation! More to the point, is there an ASCII representation of this Unicode object that Python will recognize and decode, when coming in from a file? If so, how do I get it?
>>> print simplejson.dumps(ss)
'"Capit\u00e1n"'
>>> print >> file('f3','w'), simplejson.dumps(ss)
>>> simplejson.load(open('f3'))
u'Capit\xe1n'
Rather than mess with .encode and .decode, specify the encoding when opening the file. The io module, added in Python 2.6, provides an io.open function, which allows specifying the file's encoding.
Supposing the file is encoded in UTF-8, we can use:
>>> import io
>>> f = io.open("test", mode="r", encoding="utf-8")
Then f.read returns a decoded Unicode object:
>>> f.read()
u'Capit\xe1l\n\n'
In 3.x, the io.open function is an alias for the built-in open function, which supports the encoding argument (it does not in 2.x).
We can also use open from the codecs standard library module:
>>> import codecs
>>> f = codecs.open("test", "r", "utf-8")
>>> f.read()
u'Capit\xe1l\n\n'
Note, however, that this can cause problems when mixing read() and readline().
In the notation u'Capit\xe1n\n' (should be just 'Capit\xe1n\n' in 3.x, and must be in 3.0 and 3.1), the \xe1 represents just one character. \x is an escape sequence, indicating that e1 is in hexadecimal.
Writing Capit\xc3\xa1n into the file in a text editor means that it actually contains \xc3\xa1. Those are 8 bytes and the code reads them all. We can see this by displaying the result:
# Python 3.x - reading the file as bytes rather than text,
# to ensure we see the raw data
>>> open('f2', 'rb').read()
b'Capit\\xc3\\xa1n\n'
# Python 2.x
>>> open('f2').read()
'Capit\\xc3\\xa1n\n'
Instead, just input characters like á in the editor, which should then handle the conversion to UTF-8 and save it.
In 2.x, a string that actually contains these backslash-escape sequences can be decoded using the string_escape codec:
# Python 2.x
>>> print 'Capit\\xc3\\xa1n\n'.decode('string_escape')
Capitán
The result is a str that is encoded in UTF-8 where the accented character is represented by the two bytes that were written \\xc3\\xa1 in the original string. To get a unicode result, decode again with UTF-8.
In 3.x, the string_escape codec is replaced with unicode_escape, and it is strictly enforced that we can only encode from a str to bytes, and decode from bytes to str. unicode_escape needs to start with a bytes in order to process the escape sequences (the other way around, it adds them); and then it will treat the resulting \xc3 and \xa1 as character escapes rather than byte escapes. As a result, we have to do a bit more work:
# Python 3.x
>>> 'Capit\\xc3\\xa1n\n'.encode('ascii').decode('unicode_escape').encode('latin-1').decode('utf-8')
'Capitán\n'
Now all you need in Python3 is open(Filename, 'r', encoding='utf-8')
[Edit on 2016-02-10 for requested clarification]
Python3 added the encoding parameter to its open function. The following information about the open function is gathered from here: https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#open
open(file, mode='r', buffering=-1,
encoding=None, errors=None, newline=None,
closefd=True, opener=None)
Encoding is the name of the encoding used to decode or encode the
file. This should only be used in text mode. The default encoding is
platform dependent (whatever locale.getpreferredencoding()
returns), but any text encoding supported by Python can be used.
See the codecs module for the list of supported encodings.
So by adding encoding='utf-8' as a parameter to the open function, the file reading and writing is all done as utf8 (which is also now the default encoding of everything done in Python.)
So, I've found a solution for what I'm looking for, which is:
print open('f2').read().decode('string-escape').decode("utf-8")
There are some unusual codecs that are useful here. This particular reading allows one to take UTF-8 representations from within Python, copy them into an ASCII file, and have them be read in to Unicode. Under the "string-escape" decode, the slashes won't be doubled.
This allows for the sort of round trip that I was imagining.
This works for reading a file with UTF-8 encoding in Python 3.2:
import codecs
f = codecs.open('file_name.txt', 'r', 'UTF-8')
for line in f:
print(line)
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
# converting a unknown formatting file in utf-8
import codecs
import commands
file_location = "jumper.sub"
file_encoding = commands.getoutput('file -b --mime-encoding %s' % file_location)
file_stream = codecs.open(file_location, 'r', file_encoding)
file_output = codecs.open(file_location+"b", 'w', 'utf-8')
for l in file_stream:
file_output.write(l)
file_stream.close()
file_output.close()
Aside from codecs.open(), io.open() can be used in both 2.x and 3.x to read and write text files. Example:
import io
text = u'á'
encoding = 'utf8'
with io.open('data.txt', 'w', encoding=encoding, newline='\n') as fout:
fout.write(text)
with io.open('data.txt', 'r', encoding=encoding, newline='\n') as fin:
text2 = fin.read()
assert text == text2
To read in an Unicode string and then send to HTML, I did this:
fileline.decode("utf-8").encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')
Useful for python powered http servers.
Well, your favorite text editor does not realize that \xc3\xa1 are supposed to be character literals, but it interprets them as text. That's why you get the double backslashes in the last line -- it's now a real backslash + xc3, etc. in your file.
If you want to read and write encoded files in Python, best use the codecs module.
Pasting text between the terminal and applications is difficult, because you don't know which program will interpret your text using which encoding. You could try the following:
>>> s = file("f1").read()
>>> print unicode(s, "Latin-1")
Capitán
Then paste this string into your editor and make sure that it stores it using Latin-1. Under the assumption that the clipboard does not garble the string, the round trip should work.
You have stumbled over the general problem with encodings: How can I tell in which encoding a file is?
Answer: You can't unless the file format provides for this. XML, for example, begins with:
<?xml encoding="utf-8"?>
This header was carefully chosen so that it can be read no matter the encoding. In your case, there is no such hint, hence neither your editor nor Python has any idea what is going on. Therefore, you must use the codecs module and use codecs.open(path,mode,encoding) which provides the missing bit in Python.
As for your editor, you must check if it offers some way to set the encoding of a file.
The point of UTF-8 is to be able to encode 21-bit characters (Unicode) as an 8-bit data stream (because that's the only thing all computers in the world can handle). But since most OSs predate the Unicode era, they don't have suitable tools to attach the encoding information to files on the hard disk.
The next issue is the representation in Python. This is explained perfectly in the comment by heikogerlach. You must understand that your console can only display ASCII. In order to display Unicode or anything >= charcode 128, it must use some means of escaping. In your editor, you must not type the escaped display string but what the string means (in this case, you must enter the umlaut and save the file).
That said, you can use the Python function eval() to turn an escaped string into a string:
>>> x = eval("'Capit\\xc3\\xa1n\\n'")
>>> x
'Capit\xc3\xa1n\n'
>>> x[5]
'\xc3'
>>> len(x[5])
1
As you can see, the string "\xc3" has been turned into a single character. This is now an 8-bit string, UTF-8 encoded. To get Unicode:
>>> x.decode('utf-8')
u'Capit\xe1n\n'
Gregg Lind asked: I think there are some pieces missing here: the file f2 contains: hex:
0000000: 4361 7069 745c 7863 335c 7861 316e Capit\xc3\xa1n
codecs.open('f2','rb', 'utf-8'), for example, reads them all in a separate chars (expected) Is there any way to write to a file in ASCII that would work?
Answer: That depends on what you mean. ASCII can't represent characters > 127. So you need some way to say "the next few characters mean something special" which is what the sequence "\x" does. It says: The next two characters are the code of a single character. "\u" does the same using four characters to encode Unicode up to 0xFFFF (65535).
So you can't directly write Unicode to ASCII (because ASCII simply doesn't contain the same characters). You can write it as string escapes (as in f2); in this case, the file can be represented as ASCII. Or you can write it as UTF-8, in which case, you need an 8-bit safe stream.
Your solution using decode('string-escape') does work, but you must be aware how much memory you use: Three times the amount of using codecs.open().
Remember that a file is just a sequence of bytes with 8 bits. Neither the bits nor the bytes have a meaning. It's you who says "65 means 'A'". Since \xc3\xa1 should become "à" but the computer has no means to know, you must tell it by specifying the encoding which was used when writing the file.
The \x.. sequence is something that's specific to Python. It's not a universal byte escape sequence.
How you actually enter in UTF-8-encoded non-ASCII depends on your OS and/or your editor. Here's how you do it in Windows. For OS X to enter a with an acute accent you can just hit option + E, then A, and almost all text editors in OS X support UTF-8.
You can also improve the original open() function to work with Unicode files by replacing it in place, using the partial function. The beauty of this solution is you don't need to change any old code. It's transparent.
import codecs
import functools
open = functools.partial(codecs.open, encoding='utf-8')
I was trying to parse iCal using Python 2.7.9:
from icalendar import Calendar
But I was getting:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "ical.py", line 92, in parse
print "{}".format(e[attr])
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in position 7: ordinal not in range(128)
and it was fixed with just:
print "{}".format(e[attr].encode("utf-8"))
(Now it can print liké á böss.)
I found the most simple approach by changing the default encoding of the whole script to be 'UTF-8':
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')
any open, print or other statement will just use utf8.
Works at least for Python 2.7.9.
Thx goes to https://markhneedham.com/blog/2015/05/21/python-unicodeencodeerror-ascii-codec-cant-encode-character-uxfc-in-position-11-ordinal-not-in-range128/ (look at the end).