Develop Reference

Encode Strings in Python

I want to run my code on terminal but it shows me this error :
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xd8' in file streaming.py on line
72, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/
for detail
I tried to encode the Arabic string using this :
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
st = 'المملكة العربية السعودية'.encode('utf-8')
It's very important for me to run it on the terminal so I can't use IDLE.

The problem is since you are directly pasting your characters in to a python file, the interpreter (Python 2) attempts to read them as ASCII (even before you encode, it needs to define the literal), which is illegal. What you want is a unicode literal if pasting non-ASCII bytes:
x=u'المملكة العربية السعودية' #Or whatever the corresponding bytes are
print x.encode('utf-8')
You can also try to set the entire source file to be read as utf-8:
#/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
and don't forget to make it run-able, and lastly, you can import the future from Python 3:
from __future__ import unicode_literal
at the top of the file, so string literals by default are utf-8. Note that \xd8 appears as phi in my terminal, so make sure the encoding is correct.

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character - Scrapy [duplicate]

Say I have a function:
def NewFunction():
return '£'
I want to print some stuff with a pound sign in front of it and it prints an error when I try to run this program, this error message is displayed:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xa3' in file 'blah' but no encoding declared;
see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
Can anyone inform me how I can include a pound sign in my return function? I'm basically using it in a class and it's within the '__str__' part that the pound sign is included.

I'd recommend reading that PEP the error gives you. The problem is that your code is trying to use the ASCII encoding, but the pound symbol is not an ASCII character. Try using UTF-8 encoding. You can start by putting # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- at the top of your .py file. To get more advanced, you can also define encodings on a string by string basis in your code. However, if you are trying to put the pound sign literal in to your code, you'll need an encoding that supports it for the entire file.

Adding the following two lines at the top of my .py script worked for me (first line was necessary):
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

First add the # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- line to the beginning of the file and then use u'foo' for all your non-ASCII unicode data:
def NewFunction():
return u'£'
or use the magic available since Python 2.6 to make it automatic:
from __future__ import unicode_literals

The error message tells you exactly what's wrong. The Python interpreter needs to know the encoding of the non-ASCII character.
If you want to return U+00A3 then you can say
return u'\u00a3'
which represents this character in pure ASCII by way of a Unicode escape sequence. If you want to return a byte string containing the literal byte 0xA3, that's
return b'\xa3'
(where in Python 2 the b is implicit; but explicit is better than implicit).
The linked PEP in the error message instructs you exactly how to tell Python "this file is not pure ASCII; here's the encoding I'm using". If the encoding is UTF-8, that would be
# coding=utf-8
or the Emacs-compatible
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
If you don't know which encoding your editor uses to save this file, examine it with something like a hex editor and some googling. The Stack Overflow character-encoding tag has a tag info page with more information and some troubleshooting tips.
In so many words, outside of the 7-bit ASCII range (0x00-0x7F), Python can't and mustn't guess what string a sequence of bytes represents. https://tripleee.github.io/8bit#a3 shows 21 possible interpretations for the byte 0xA3 and that's only from the legacy 8-bit encodings; but it could also very well be the first byte of a multi-byte encoding. But in fact, I would guess you are actually using Latin-1, so you should have
# coding: latin-1
as the first or second line of your source file. Anyway, without knowledge of which character the byte is supposed to represent, a human would not be able to guess this, either.
A caveat: coding: latin-1 will definitely remove the error message (because there are no byte sequences which are not technically permitted in this encoding), but might produce completely the wrong result when the code is interpreted if the actual encoding is something else. You really have to know the encoding of the file with complete certainty when you declare the encoding.

Adding the following two lines in the script solved the issue for me.
# !/usr/bin/python
# coding=utf-8
Hope it helps !

You're probably trying to run Python 3 file with Python 2 interpreter. Currently (as of 2019), python command defaults to Python 2 when both versions are installed, on Windows and most Linux distributions.
But in case you're indeed working on a Python 2 script, a not yet mentioned on this page solution is to resave the file in UTF-8+BOM encoding, that will add three special bytes to the start of the file, they will explicitly inform the Python interpreter (and your text editor) about the file encoding.

python convert list items to unicode in a single line

This is my code:
mylist=['尺','选择']
[x.encode('utf-8') for x in mylist]
beofore i could even get to the second line of my file, the script returns an error:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe5' in file but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details
how do i solve this?

You need to set source code encoding to UTF-8 for this. As per PEP-0263 , Try setting the below line at the top of the script
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
The different styles possible for specifying source code encodings are given in the PEP linked above.

Using urlencode for Devanagari text

The following code:
import simplejson,urllib,urllib2
query=[u'नेपाल']
urlbase="http://search.twitter.com/search.json"
values={'q':query[0]}
data=urllib.urlencode(values)
req=urllib2.Request(urlbase,data)
response=urllib2.urlopen(req)
json=simplejson.load(response)
print json
throws exception:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe0' in file ques.py on line 3, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
The code works if query contains standard ASCII characters. I tried looking at the suggested link but couldn't figure out how to specify encoding for Devanagari characters.

You need to add the UTF-8 header to your file to tell the Python interpreter that there are unicode literals. You also have to encode the parameters as UTF-8. Here's a working version:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import simplejson,urllib,urllib2
query=[u'नेपाल']
urlbase="http://search.twitter.com/search.json"
values={'q':query[0].encode('utf-8')}
data=urllib.urlencode(values)
req=urllib2.Request(urlbase,data)
response=urllib2.urlopen(req)
json=simplejson.load(response)
print json

Hebrew characters in Python code on eclipse

I'm writing python code on eclipse and whenver I use hebrew characters I get the following syntax error:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xfa' in file ... on line 66, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
How do I declare unicode/utf-8 encoding?
I tried adding
-*- coding: Unicode -*-
or
-*- coding: utf-8 -*-
in the commented section in the beginnning of the py file. It didn't work.
I'm running eclipse with pydev, python 2.6 on windows 7.

I tried it also and here is my conclusion:
You should add
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
at the very first line in your file.
And yes, I work with windows...
If I got it right, you are missing the #

Ensure that the encoding the editor is using to enter data matches the declared encoding in the file metadata.
This isn't something unique to Eclipse or Python; it applies to all character data formats and text editors.
Python has a number of options for dealing with string literals in both the str and unicode types via escape sequences. I believe there were changes to string literals between Python 2 and 3.
Python 2.7 string literals
Python 3.2 string literals

I had the same thing and it was because I'd tried to do:
a='言語版の記事'
When I should have done:
a=u'言語版の記事'
I think it's python/pydev complaining when trying to parse the source, rather than eclipse as such.

"Unicode" is certainly wrong, and \xfa is not UTF-8. Figure out which encoding is actually being used and declare that instead.