In this post, you can find several solutions for:
SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’ codec can’t decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape
While this error can appear in different situations the reason for the error is one and the same:
- there are special characters( escape sequence — characters starting with backslash — » ).
- From the error above you can recognize that the culprit is ‘U’ — which is considered as unicode character.
- another possible errors for SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’ will be raised for ‘x’, ‘u’
- codec can’t decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated xXX escape
- codec can’t decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated uXXXX escape
- another possible errors for SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’ will be raised for ‘x’, ‘u’
Step #1: How to solve SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’ — Double slashes for escape characters
Let’s start with one of the most frequent examples — windows paths. In this case there is a bad character sequence in the string:
import json
json_data=open("C:Userstest.txt").read()
json_obj = json.loads(json_data)
The problem is that U is considered as a special escape sequence for Python string. In order to resolved you need to add second escape character like:
import json
json_data=open("C:\Users\test.txt").read()
json_obj = json.loads(json_data)
Step #2: Use raw strings to prevent SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’
If the first option is not good enough or working then raw strings are the next option. Simply by adding r (for raw string literals) to resolve the error. This is an example of raw strings:
import json
json_data=open(r"C:Userstest.txt").read()
json_obj = json.loads(json_data)
If you like to find more information about Python strings, literals
2.4.1 String literals
In the same link we can find:
When an r' or R’ prefix is present, backslashes are still used to quote the following character, but all backslashes are left in the string. For example, the string literal r»n» consists of two characters: a backslash and a lowercase `n’.
Step #3: Slashes for file paths -SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’
Another possible solution is to replace the backslash with slash for paths of files and folders. For example:
«C:Userstest.txt»
will be changed to:
«C:/Users/test.txt»
Since python can recognize both I prefer to use only the second way in order to avoid such nasty traps. Another reason for using slashes is your code to be uniform and homogeneous.
The picture below demonstrates how the error will look like in PyCharm. In order to understand what happens you will need to investigate the error log.
The error log will have information for the program flow as:
/home/vanx/Software/Tensorflow/environments/venv36/bin/python3 /home/vanx/PycharmProjects/python/test/Other/temp.py
File "/home/vanx/PycharmProjects/python/test/Other/temp.py", line 3
json_data=open("C:Userstest.txt").read()
^
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape
You can see the latest call which produces the error and click on it. Once the reason is identified then you can test what could solve the problem.
PEP: Python3 and UnicodeDecodeError
This is a PEP describing the behaviour of Python3 on UnicodeDecodeError. It’s a draft, don’t hesitate to comment it. This document suppose that my patch to allow bytes filenames is accepted which is not the case today.
While I was writing this document I found poential problems in Python3. So here is a TODO list (things to be checked):
- FIXME: When bytearray is accepted or not?
- FIXME: Allow bytes/str mix for shutil.copy*()? The ignore callback will get bytes or unicode?
Can anyone write a section about bytes encoding in Unicode using escape sequence?
What is the best tool to work on a PEP? I hate email threads, and I would prefer SVN / Mercurial / anything else.
Python3 and UnicodeDecodeError for the command line, environment variables and filenames
Introduction
Python3 does its best to give you texts encoded as a valid unicode characters strings. When it hits an invalid bytes sequence (according to the used charset), it has two choices: drops the value or raises an UnicodeDecodeError. This document present the behaviour of Python3 for the command line, environment variables and filenames.
Example of an invalid bytes sequence: ::
>>> str(b'xff', 'utf8') UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xff (...)
whereas the same byte sequence is valid in another charset like ISO-8859-1: ::
>>> str(b'xff', 'iso-8859-1') 'ÿ'
Default encoding
Python uses «UTF-8» as the default Unicode encoding. You can read the default charset using sys.getdefaultencoding(). The «default encoding» is used by PyUnicode_FromStringAndSize().
A function sys.setdefaultencoding() exists, but it raises a ValueError for charset different than UTF-8 since the charset is hardcoded in PyUnicode_FromStringAndSize().
Command line
Python creates a nice unicode table for sys.argv using mbstowcs(): ::
$ ./python -c 'import sys; print(sys.argv)' 'Ho hé !' ['-c', 'Ho hé !']
On Linux, mbstowcs() uses LC_CTYPE environement variable to choose the encoding. On an invalid bytes sequence, Python quits directly with an exit code 1. Example with UTF-8 locale:
$ python3.0 $(echo -e 'invalid:xff') Could not convert argument 1 to string
Environment variables
Python uses «_wenviron» on Windows which are contains unicode (UTF-16-LE) strings. On other OS, it uses «environ» variable and the UTF-8 charset. It drops a variable if its key or value is not convertible to unicode. Example:
env -i HOME=/home/my PATH=$(echo -e "xff") python
>>> import os; list(os.environ.items())
[('HOME', '/home/my')]
Both key and values are unicode strings. Empty key and/or value are allowed.
Python ignores invalid variables, but values still exist in memory. If you run a child process (eg. using os.system()), the «invalid» variables will also be copied.
Filenames
Introduction
Python2 uses byte filenames everywhere, but it was also possible to use unicode filenames. Examples:
- os.getcwd() gives bytes whereas os.getcwdu() always returns unicode
-
os.listdir(unicode) creates bytes or unicode filenames (fallback to bytes on UnicodeDecodeError), os.readlink() has the same behaviour
- glob.glob() converts the unicode pattern to bytes, and so create bytes filenames
- open() supports bytes and unicode
Since listdir() mix bytes and unicode, you are not able to manipulate easily filenames:
>>> path=u'.'
>>> for name in os.listdir(path):
... print repr(name)
... print repr(os.path.join(path, name))
...
u'valid'
u'./valid'
'invalidxff'
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/posixpath.py", line 65, in join
path += '/' + b
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff (...)
Python3 supports both types, bytes and unicode, but disallow mixing them. If you ask for unicode, you will always get unicode or an exception is raised.
You should only use unicode filenames, except if you are writing a program fixing file system encoding, a backup tool or you users are unable to fix their broken system.
Windows
Microsoft Windows since Windows 95 only uses Unicode (UTF-16-LE) filenames. So you should only use unicode filenames.
Non Windows (POSIX)
POSIX OS like Linux uses bytes for historical reasons. In the best case, all filenames will be encoded as valid UTF-8 strings and Python creates valid unicode strings. But since system calls uses bytes, the file system may returns an invalid filename, or a program can creates a file with an invalid filename.
An invalid filename is a string which can not be decoded to unicode using the default file system encoding (which is UTF-8 most of the time).
A robust program will have to use only the bytes type to make sure that it can open / copy / remove any file or directory.
Filename encoding
Python use:
- «mbcs» on Windows
- or «utf-8» on Mac OS X
- or nl_langinfo(CODESET) on OS supporting this function
- or UTF-8 by default
«mbcs» is not a valid charset name, it’s an internal charset saying that Python will use the function MultiByteToWideChar() to decode bytes to unicode. This function uses the current codepage to decode bytes string.
You can read the charset using sys.getfilesystemencoding(). The function may returns None if Python is unable to determine the default encoding.
PyUnicode_DecodeFSDefaultAndSize() uses the default file system encoding, or UTF-8 if it is not set.
On UNIX (and other operating systems), it’s possible to mount different file systems using different charsets. sys.getdefaultencoding() will be the same for the different file systems since this encoding is only used between Python and the Linux kernel, not between the kernel and the file system which may uses a different charset.
Display a filename
Example of a function formatting a filename to display it to human eyes: ::
from sys import getfilesystemencoding
def format_filename(filename):
return str(filename, getfilesystemencoding(), 'replace')
Example: format_filename(‘rxffport.doc’) gives ‘r�port.doc’ with the UTF-8 encoding.
Functions producing filenames
Policy: for unicode arguments: drop invalid bytes filenames; for bytes arguments: return bytes
- os.listdir()
- glob.glob()
This behaviour (drop silently invalid filenames) is motivated by the fact to if a directory of 1000 files only contains one invalid file, listdir() fails for the whole directory. Or if your directory contains 1000 python scripts (.py) and just one another document with an invalid filename (eg. r�port.doc), glob.glob(‘*.py’) fails whereas all .py scripts have valid filename.
Policy: for an unicode argument: raise an UnicodeDecodeError on invalid filename; for an bytes argument: return bytes
- os.readlink()
Policy: create unicode directory or raise an UnicodeDecodeError
- os.getcwd()
Policy: always returns bytes
- os.getcwdb()
Functions for filename manipulation
Policy: raise TypeError on bytes/str mix
- os.path.*(), eg. os.path.join()
- fnmatch.*()
Functions accessing files
Policy: accept both bytes and str
- io.open()
- os.open()
- os.chdir()
- os.stat(), os.lstat()
- os.rename()
- os.unlink()
- shutil.*()
os.rename(), shutil.copy*(), shutil.move() allow to use bytes for an argment, and unicode for the other argument
bytearray
In most cases, bytearray() can be used as bytes for a filename.
Unicode normalisation
Unicode characters can be normalized in 4 forms: NFC, NFD, NFKC or NFKD. Python does never normalize strings (nor filenames). No operating system does normalize filenames. So the users using different norms will be unable to retrieve their file. Don’t panic! All users use the same norm.
Use unicodedata.normalize() to normalize an unicode string.
Table of Contents
Hide
- What is SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’ codec can’t decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape?
- How to fix SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’ codec can’t decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape?
- Solution 1 – Using Double backslash (\)
- Solution 2 – Using raw string by prefixing ‘r’
- Solution 3 – Using forward slash
- Conclusion
The SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’ codec can’t decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape occurs if you are trying to access a file path with a regular string.
In this tutorial, we will take a look at what exactly (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’ codec can’t decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape means and how to fix it with examples.
The Python String literals can be enclosed in matching single quotes (‘) or double quotes (“).
String literals can also be prefixed with a letter ‘r‘ or ‘R‘; such strings are called raw strings and use different rules for backslash escape sequences.
They can also be enclosed in matching groups of three single or double quotes (these are generally referred to as triple-quoted strings).
The backslash () character is used to escape characters that otherwise have a special meaning, such as newline, backslash itself, or the quote character.
Now that we have understood the string literals. Let us take an example to demonstrate the issue.
import pandas
# read the file
pandas.read_csv("C:UsersitsmycodeDesktoptest.csv")
Output
File "c:PersonalIJSCodeprogram.py", line 4
pandas.read_csv("C:UsersitsmycodeDesktoptest.csv") ^
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated UXXXXXXXX escapeWe are using the single backslash in the above code while providing the file path. Since the backslash is present in the file path, it is interpreted as a special character or escape character (any sequence starting with ‘’). In particular, “U” introduces a 32-bit Unicode character.
How to fix SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’ codec can’t decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape?
Solution 1 – Using Double backslash (\)
In Python, the single backslash in the string is interpreted as a special character, and the character U(in users) will be treated as the Unicode code point.
We can fix the issue by escaping the backslash, and we can do that by adding an additional backslash, as shown below.
import pandas
# read the file
pandas.read_csv("C:\Users\itsmycode\Desktop\test.csv")Solution 2 – Using raw string by prefixing ‘r’
We can also escape the Unicode by prefixing r in front of the string. The r stands for “raw” and indicates that backslashes need to be escaped, and they should be treated as a regular backslash.
import pandas
# read the file
pandas.read_csv("C:\Users\itsmycode\Desktop\test.csv")Solution 3 – Using forward slash
Another easier way is to avoid the backslash and instead replace it with the forward-slash character(/), as shown below.
import pandas
# read the file
pandas.read_csv("C:/Users/itsmycode/Desktop/test.csv")
Conclusion
The SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’ codec can’t decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape occurs if you are trying to access a file path and provide the path as a regular string.
We can solve the issue by escaping the single backslash with a double backslash or prefixing the string with ‘r,’ which converts it into a raw string. Alternatively, we can replace the backslash with a forward slash.
Srinivas Ramakrishna is a Solution Architect and has 14+ Years of Experience in the Software Industry. He has published many articles on Medium, Hackernoon, dev.to and solved many problems in StackOverflow. He has core expertise in various technologies such as Microsoft .NET Core, Python, Node.JS, JavaScript, Cloud (Azure), RDBMS (MSSQL), React, Powershell, etc.
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Я использую python 3.1, на машинах windows 7. Русский язык является системным языком по умолчанию, а utf-8-кодировкой по умолчанию.
глядя на ответ на предыдущий вопрос, я пытаюсь использовать модуль «кодеки», чтобы дать мне немного удачи. Вот несколько примеров:
>>> g = codecs.open("C:UsersEricDesktopbeeline.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-4: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape (<pyshell#39>, line 1)
>>> g = codecs.open("C:UsersEricDesktopSite.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-4: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape (<pyshell#40>, line 1)
>>> g = codecs.open("C:Python31Notes.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 11-12: malformed N character escape (<pyshell#41>, line 1)
>>> g = codecs.open("C:UsersEricDesktopSite.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-4: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape (<pyshell#44>, line 1)
моя последняя идея заключалась в том, что я думал, что это может быть тот факт, что windows «переводит» несколько папок, таких как папка «пользователи», на русский язык (хотя ввод «пользователи правильный путь), поэтому я попробовал его в папке Python31. И все же не повезло. Есть идеи?
43506
11
11 ответов:
проблема со строкой
"C:UsersEricDesktopbeeline.txt"здесь
Uначинается в восемь символов Unicode бегства, такие как ‘U00014321`. В вашем коде за экранированием следует символ «s», который является недопустимым.вам либо нужно дублировать все обратные косые черты, либо префикс строки с
r(для получения необработанной строки).
типичная ошибка в Windows, потому что каталог пользователя по умолчанию
C:user<your_user>, поэтому, когда вы хотите использовать этот путь в качестве строкового параметра в функцию Python, вы получаете ошибку Unicode, просто потому, чтоu— это Unicode escape. Любой символ не числовой после этого выдает ошибку.чтобы решить эту проблему, просто удвоить обратную косую черту:
C:\user\<your_user>...
префикс с ‘r’ работает очень хорошо, но он должен быть в правильном синтаксисе. Например:
passwordFile = open(r'''C:UsersBobSecretPasswordFile.txt''')нет необходимости в [двойные обратные косые черты] здесь-поддерживает читаемость и хорошо работает.
см. документ openpyxl, вы можете сделать изменения следующим образом.
from openpyxl import Workbook from openpyxl.drawing.image import Image wb = Workbook() ws = wb.active ws['A1'] = 'Insert a xxx.PNG' # Reload an image img = Image(**r**'x:xxxxxxxxx.png') # Insert to worksheet and anchor next to cells ws.add_image(img, 'A2') wb.save(**r**'x:xxxxxx.xlsx')
С Python 3 у меня была эта проблема:
self.path = 'T:PythonScriptsProjectsUtilities'произвел эту ошибку:
self.path = 'T:PythonScriptsProjectsUtilities' ^ SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 25-26: truncated UXXXXXXXX escapeисправление, которое сработало:
self.path = r'T:PythonScriptsProjectsUtilities'похоже, что «U «создавал ошибку, а «r», предшествующий строке, отключает восьмизначный Unicode escape (для необработанной строки), который не удался. (Это немного чрезмерное упрощение, но оно работает, если вы не заботитесь о unicode)
надеюсь, это поможет кому-то
у меня была такая же ошибка в Python 3.2.
у меня есть скрипт для отправки email и:
csv.reader(open('work_diruslugi1.csv', newline='', encoding='utf-8'))когда я удаляю первый символ в файле
uslugi1.csvработает нормально.
или вы можете заменить ‘ ‘ на ‘ / ‘ в пути.
У меня была такая же ошибка, просто удалил и снова установил пакет numpy, который работал!
path = pd.read_csv(**'C:UsersmraviDesktopfilename'**)ошибка из-за пути, который упоминается
добавить ‘r’ перед путем
path = pd.read_csv(**r'C:UsersmraviDesktopfilename'**)это будет работать нормально.
У меня была эта ошибка.
У меня есть основной скрипт python, который вызывает функции из другого, 2-го, скрипта python.
В конце первого скрипта у меня был блок комментариев, обозначенный''' '''.
Я получал эту ошибку из-за этого блока кода комментария.
Я повторил ошибку несколько раз, как только я нашел его, чтобы убедиться, что это была ошибка, и это было.
Я до сих пор не знаю, почему.
Introduction to Python Unicode Error
In Python, Unicode is defined as a string type for representing the characters that allow the Python program to work with any type of different possible characters. For example, any path of the directory or any link address as a string. When we use such a string as a parameter to any function, there is a possibility of the occurrence of an error. Such error is known as Unicode error in Python. We get such an error because any character after the Unicode escape sequence (“ u ”) produces an error which is a typical error on windows.
Working of Unicode Error in Python with Examples
Unicode standard in Python is the representation of characters in code point format. These standards are made to avoid ambiguity between the characters specified, which may occur Unicode errors. For example, let us consider “ I ” as roman number one. It can be even considered the capital alphabet “ i ”; they both look the same, but they are two different characters with a different meaning to avoid such ambiguity; we use Unicode standards.
In Python, Unicode standards have two types of error: Unicode encodes error and Unicode decode error. In Python, it includes the concept of Unicode error handlers. These handlers are invoked whenever a problem or error occurs in the process of encoding or decoding the string or given text. To include Unicode characters in the Python program, we first use Unicode escape symbol u before any string, which can be considered as a Unicode-type variable.
Syntax:
Unicode characters in Python program can be written as follows:
“u dfskgfkdsg”
Or
“U sakjhdxhj”
Or
“u1232hgdsa”
In the above syntax, we can see 3 different ways of declaring Unicode characters. In the Python program, we can write Unicode literals with prefix either “u” or “U” followed by a string containing alphabets and numerical where we can see the above two syntax examples. At the end last syntax sample, we can also use the “u” Unicode escape sequence to declare Unicode characters in the program. In this, we have to note that using “u”, we can write a string containing any alphabet or numerical, but when we want to declare any hex value then we have to “x” escape sequence which takes two hex digits and for octal, it will take digit 777.
Example #1
Now let us see an example below for declaring Unicode characters in the program.
Code:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: latin-1 -*-
a= u'dfsfxacu1234'
print("The value of the above unicode literal is as follows:")
print(ord(a[-1]))Output:
In the above program, we can see the sample of Unicode literals in the python program, but before that, we need to declare encoding, which is different in different versions of Python, and in this program, we can see in the first two lines of the program.
Now we will see the Unicode errors such as Unicode encoding Error and Unicode decoding errors, which are handled by Unicode error handlers, are invoked automatically whenever the errors are encountered. There are 3 typical errors in Python Unicode error handlers.
Strict error in Python raises UnicodeEncodeError and UnicodeDecodeError for encoding and decoding errors that are occurred, respectively.
Example #2
UnicodeEncodeError demonstration and its example.
In Python, it cannot detect Unicode characters, and therefore it throws an encoding error as it cannot encode the given Unicode string.
Code:
str(u'éducba')
Output:
In the above program, we can see we have passed the argument to the str() function, which is a Unicode string. But this function will use the default encoding process ASCII. As we can see in the above statement, we have not specified any encoding at the starting of this program, and therefore it throws an error, and the default encoding that is used is 7-bit encoding, and it cannot recognize the characters that are outside the 0 to 128 range. Therefore, we can see the error that is displayed in the above screenshot.
The above program can be fixed by encoding Unicode string manually, such as .encode(‘utf8’), before passing the Unicode string to the str() function.
Example #3
In this program, we have called the str() function explicitly, which may again throw an UnicodeEncodeError.
Code:
a = u'café'
b = a.encode('utf8')
r = str(b)
print("The unicode string after fixing the UnicodeEncodeError is as follows:")
print(r)Output:
In the above, we can show how we can avoid UnicodeEncodeError manually by using .encode(‘utf8’) to the Unicode string.
Example #4
Now we will see the UnicodeDecodeError demonstration and its example and how to avoid it.
Code:
a = u'éducba'
b = a.encode('utf8')
unicode(b)
Output:
In the above program, we can see we are trying to print the Unicode characters by encoding first; then we are trying to convert the encoded string into Unicode characters, which mean decoding back to Unicode characters as given at the starting. In the above program, when we run, we get an error as UnicodeDecodeError. So to avoid this error, we have to manually decode the Unicode character “b”.
So we can fix it by using the below statement, and we can see it in the above screenshot.
b.decode(‘utf8’)
Conclusion
In this article, we conclude that in Python, Unicode literals are other types of string for representing different types of string. In this article, we saw different errors like UnicodeEncodeError and UnicodeDecodeError, which are used to encode and decode strings in the program, along with examples. In this article, we also saw how to fix these errors manually by passing the string to the function.
Recommended Articles
This is a guide to Python Unicode Error. Here we discuss the introduction to Python Unicode Error and working of Unicode error with examples, respectively. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –
- Python String Operations
- Python Sort List
- Quick Sort in Python
- Python Constants
Introduction
The following error message is a common Python error, the «SyntaxError» represents a Python syntax error and the «unicodeescape» means that we made a mistake in using unicode escape character.
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 0-5: truncated UXXXXXXXX escapeSimply to put, the «SyntaxError» can be occurred accidentally in Python and it is often happens because the (ESCAPE CHARACTER) is misused in a python string, it caused the unicodeescape error.
(Note: «escape character» can convert your other character to be a normal character.)
SyntaxError Example
Let’s look at an example:
print('It's a nice day.')Looks like we want to print «It’s a nice day.«, right? But the program will report an error message.
File "<stdin>", line 1
print('It's a nice day.')
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntaxThe reason is very easy-to-know. In Python, we can use print('xxx') to print out xxx. But in our code, if we had used the ' character, the Python interpreter will misinterpret the range of our characters so it will report an error.
To solve this problem, we need to add an escape character «» to convert our ‘ character to be a normal character, not a superscript of string.
print('It's a nice day.')Output:
It's a nice day.We print it successfully!
So how did the syntax error happen? Let me talk about my example:
One day, I run my program for experiment, I saved some data in a csv file. In order for this file can be viewed on the Windows OS, I add a new code uFFEF in the beginning of file.
This is «BOM» (Byte Order Mark), Explain to the system that the file format is «Big-Ending«.
I got the error message.
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 0-5: truncated UXXXXXXXX escapeAs mentioned at the beginning of this article, this is an escape character error in Python.
Solutions
There are three solutions you can try:
- Add a «r» character in the right of string
- Change
to be/ - Change
to be\
Solution 1: Add a «r» character in the beginning of string.
title = r'uFFEF'After we adding a r character at right side of python string, it means a complete string not anything else.
Solution 2: Change /.
open("C:UsersClayDesktoptest.txt")Change to:
open("C:/Users/Clay/Desktop/test.txt")This way is avoid to use escape character.
Solution 3: Change \.
open("C:UsersClayDesktoptest.txt")Change the code to:
open("C:\Users\Clay\Desktop\test.txt")It is similar to the solution 2 that it also avoids the use of escape characters.
The above are three common solutions. We can run normally on Windows.
Reference
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37400974/unicode-error-unicodeescape-codec-cant-decode-bytes-in-position-2-3-trunca
- https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Error-unicodeescape-codec-can-t-decode-bytes/td-p/427540
Read More
- [Solved][Python] ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘cStringIO’
Python 2.7. Unicode Errors Simply Explained
I know I’m late with this article for about 5 years or so, but people are still using Python 2.x, so this subject is relevant I think.
Some facts first:
- Unicode is an international encoding standard for use with different languages and scripts
- In python-2.x, there are two types that deal with text.
stris an 8-bit string.unicodeis for strings of unicode code points.
A code point is a number that maps to a particular abstract character. It is written using the notation U+12ca to mean the character with value 0x12ca (4810 decimal)
- Encoding (noun) is a map of Unicode code points to a sequence of bytes. (Synonyms: character encoding, character set, codeset). Popular encodings: UTF-8, ASCII, Latin-1, etc.
- Encoding (verb) is a process of converting
unicodeto bytes ofstr, and decoding is the reverce operation. - Python 2.x uses ASCII as a default encoding. (More about this later)
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character
When you sees something like this
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character 'xd0' in file /tmp/p.py on line 2, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
you just need to define encoding in the first or second line of your file.
All you need is to have string coding=utf8 or coding: utf8 somewhere in your comments.
Python doesn’t care what goes before or after those string, so the following will work fine too:
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
Notice the dash in utf-8. Python has many aliases for UTF-8 encoding, so you should not worry about dashes or case sensitivity.
UnicodeEncodeError Explained
>>> str(u'café') Traceback (most recent call last): File "<input>", line 1, in <module> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'xe9' in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)
str() function encodes a string. We passed a unicode string, and it tried to encode it using a default encoding, which is ASCII. Now the error makes sence because ASCII is 7-bit encoding which doesn’t know how to represent characters outside of range 0..128.
Here we called str() explicitly, but something in your code may call it implicitly and you will also get UnicodeEncodeError.
How to fix: encode unicode string manually using .encode('utf8') before passing to str()
UnicodeDecodeError Explained
>>> utf_string = u'café' >>> byte_string = utf_string.encode('utf8') >>> unicode(byte_string) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<input>", line 1, in <module> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)
Let’s say we somehow obtained a byte string byte_string which contains encoded UTF-8 characters. We could get this by simply using a library that returns str type.
Then we passed the string to a function that converts it to unicode. In this example we explicitly call unicode(), but some functions may call it implicitly and you’ll get the same error.
Now again, Python uses ASCII encoding by default, so it tries to convert bytes to a default encoding ASCII. Since there is no ASCII symbol that converts to 0xc3 (195 decimal) it fails with UnicodeDecodeError.
How to fix: decode str manually using .decode('utf8') before passing to your function.
Rule of Thumb
Make sure your code works only with Unicode strings internally, converting to a particular encoding on output, and decoding str on input.
Learn the libraries you are using, and find places where they return str. Decode str before return value is passed further in your code.
I use this helper function in my code:
def force_to_unicode(text): "If text is unicode, it is returned as is. If it's str, convert it to Unicode using UTF-8 encoding" return text if isinstance(text, unicode) else text.decode('utf8')
Source: https://docs.python.org/2/howto/unicode.html
In Python, This SyntaxError occurred when you are trying to access a path with normal String. As you know ‘/’ is escape character in Python that’s having different meaning by adding with different characters for example ‘n’ is use for ne line , ‘t’ use for tab.
This error is considered as SyntaxError because unicode forward slash () is not allow in path.
In further section of topic you will learn how to handle this problem in Python while writing path of file to access it.
Example of SyntaxError of Unicode Error
Lets take below example to read CSV file in Windows operating system.
import csv
with open('C:Userssaurabh.guptaDesktopPython Exampleinput.csv','r') as csvfile:
reader=csv.reader(csvfile)
for record in reader:
print(record)
If you notice the above code is having path for windows file system to access input.csv. In windows path mentioned by using forward slash () while in Python programming forward slash() is use for handling unicode characters. That’s why when you execute the above program will throw below exception.
Output
File "C:/Users/saurabh.gupta14/Desktop/Python Example/ReadingCSV.py", line 2
with open('C:Userssaurabh.guptaDesktopPython Exampleinput.csv','r') as csvfile:
Solution
The above error is occurred because of handling forward slash() as normal string. To handle such problem in Python , there are couple of solutions:
1: Just put r in path before your normal string it converts normal string to raw string:
with open(r'C:Userssaurabh.guptaDesktopPython Exampleinput.csv','r')
2: Use back slash (/) instated of forward slash()
with open('C:/Users/saurabh.gupta/Desktop/Python Example/input.csv','r')
3: Use double forward slash (\) instead of forward slash() because in Python the unicode double forward value convert in string as forward slash()’
with open('C:\Users\saurabh.gupta\Desktop\Python Example\input.csv','r')
If this solution help you , Please like and write in comment section or any other way you know to handle this issue write in comment so that help others.