How do I fix UnicodeDecodeError in Python?

How do I fix UnicodeDecodeError in Python?

tl;dr / quick fix

1. Don’t decode/encode willy nilly.
2. Don’t assume your strings are UTF-8 encoded.
3. Try to convert strings to Unicode strings as soon as possible in your code.
4. Fix your locale: How to solve UnicodeDecodeError in Python 3.6?
5. Don’t be tempted to use quick reload hacks.

What is UnicodeDecodeError?

The UnicodeDecodeError normally happens when decoding an str string from a certain coding. Since codings map only a limited number of str strings to unicode characters, an illegal sequence of str characters will cause the coding-specific decode() to fail.

How do you use codecs in Python?

With the help of codecs. decode() method, we can decode the binary string into normal form by using codecs. decode() method. Return : Return the decoded string.

What is codecs module in Python?

The codecs module defines a set of base classes which define the interface and can also be used to easily write your own codecs for use in Python. Each codec has to define four interfaces to make it usable as codec in Python: stateless encoder, stateless decoder, stream reader and stream writer.

What is Unicodeescape error in Python?

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. We get such an error because any character after the Unicode escape sequence (“ ”) produces an error which is a typical error on windows.

What does Unicodeescape mean?

Introduction. SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘unicodeescape’ codec can’t decode bytes in position 0-5: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape. This is a common Python error, the “SyntaxError” represents a syntax error and the “unicodeescape” represents we want to use unicode escape character.

Which is better ASCII or UTF-8?

UTF-8 encodes Unicode characters into a sequence of 8-bit bytes. Each 8-bit extension to ASCII differs from the rest. For characters represented by the 7-bit ASCII character codes, the UTF-8 representation is exactly equivalent to ASCII, allowing transparent round trip migration.

How to ignore unicodedecodeerror when reading a Python file?

‘backslashreplace’ (also only supported when writing) replaces unsupported characters with Python’s backslashed escape sequences. Opening the file with anything other than ‘strict’ ( ‘ignore’, ‘replace’, etc.) will then let you read the file without exceptions being raised.

Do you need to force Unicode support in Python 2.7?

So you don’t need to force Unicode support like Python 2.7. Try to run your code normally. If you get any error reading a Unicode text file you need to use the encoding=’utf-8′ parameter while reading the file. Thanks for contributing an answer to Stack Overflow!

How to ignore non ASCII characters in Python?

I have to read a text file into Python. The file encoding is: This is a third-party file, and I get a new one every day, so I would rather not change it. The file has non ascii characters, such as Ö, for example. I need to read the lines using python, and I can afford to ignore a line which has a non-ascii character.

What happens if you ignore a Unicode error?

‘ignore’ ignores errors. Note that ignoring encoding errors can lead to data loss. ‘replace’ causes a replacement marker (such as ‘?’) to be inserted where there is malformed data. ‘surrogateescape’ will represent any incorrect bytes as code points in the Unicode Private Use Area ranging from U+DC80 to U+DCFF.