1) How do I convert a variable with a string like "wdzi\xc4\x99czno\xc5\x9bci" into "wdzięczności"?
2) Also how do I convert string variable with characters like "±", "ę", "Ć" into correct letters?
I emphasise "variable" because all I've got from googling was examples with " u'some string' " and the like and I can't get anything like that to work.
I use "# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-" in second line of my script and I still crash into these problems.
Also I was said that simple print should output correctly - but it does not.
In Python 2.7 IDLE, I get this output:
>>> print "wdzi\xc4\x99czno\xc5\x9bci".decode('utf-8')
wdzięczności
Your first string appears to be a UTF-8 byte string, so all that's necessary is to decode it into a Unicode string. When Python prints that string, it will encode it back to the proper encoding based on your environment.
If you're using Python 3 then you have a string that has been decoded improperly and will need a little more work to fix the damage.
>>> print("wdzi\xc4\x99czno\xc5\x9bci".encode('iso-8859-1').decode('utf-8'))
wdzięczności
So I've been getting all caught up in unicode and utf-8 as i have a script which grabs images and their titles off the web. Works great, except when their title has special characters (eg. Jökulsárlón.)
it comes out as unicode :-
J\\xc3\\xb6kuls\\xc3\\xa1rl\\xc3\\xb3n
So i want a way to turn that string into plain text- whether is turning them into nearest 'normal' letters (like plain o instead of ö) or printing those actual symbols (rather than \xc3 etc.) I've tried a billion different ways, but a lot of the things i've been reading havent worked for me in python 3.
Thanks in advance
It's indeed UTF-8 but they're bytes:
>>> b = b'J\xc3\xb6kuls\xc3\xa1rl\xc3\xb3n'
>>> b
b'J\xc3\xb6kuls\xc3\xa1rl\xc3\xb3n'
>>> b.decode('utf-8')
'Jökulsárlón'
As this is Python 3.x, this is a Unicode string.
J\xc3\xb6kuls\xc3\xa1rl\xc3\xb3n is not unicode. It may be UTF-8 though.
To turn them into Unicode you have to decode them. s.decode('utf-8') if it were UTF-8, for example.
Before printing or writing you have to encode them again. If you encode to ASCII, the encode method accepts an option that tells it what to do with code points that cannot be represented in the given encoding.
For example: print(s.encode('ascii', errors='ignore')
errors accepts more options.
If your string is <class 'str'> and it prints literally J\\xc3\\xb6kuls\\xc3\\xa1rl\\xc3\\xb3n, then the last line below will decode it:
>>> s='J\\xc3\\xb6kuls\\xc3\\xa1rl\\xc3\\xb3n'
>>> type(s)
<class 'str'>
>>> s
'J\\xc3\\xb6kuls\\xc3\\xa1rl\\xc3\\xb3n'
>>> s.encode('latin1').decode('unicode_escape').encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
'Jökulsárlón'
How it got that convoluted is unknown. If this isn't the solution, then update your question with the type of the variable holding the string (type(s) for example) and the exact value as shown above for my example.
One of the values in a JSON file I'm parsing is Wroc\u00c5\u0082aw. How can I turn this string into a unicode object that yields "Wrocław" (which is the correct decoding in this case)?
It looks like whatever process generated that JSON took UTF-8-encoded text and mistook it for Latin-1-encoded text. To fix the error, run the same process in reverse:
>>> u'Wroc\u00c5\u0082aw'.encode('iso-8859-1').decode('utf-8')
u'Wroc\u0142aw'
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.name(u'\u0142')
'LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE'
It looks your JSON hasn't the right encoding because neither \u00c5 nor \u0082aw yields the characters you're expecting in any encoding.
But you'd maybe try to encode this value in UTF8 or UTF16
I have a definition that builds a string composed of UTF-8 encoded characters. The output files are opened using 'w+', "utf-8" arguments.
However, when I try to x.write(string) I get the UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ufeff' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
I assume this is because normally for example you would do `print(u'something'). But I need to use a variable and the quotations in u'_' negate that...
Any suggestions?
EDIT: Actual code here:
source = codecs.open("actionbreak/" + target + '.csv','r', "utf-8")
outTarget = codecs.open("actionbreak/" + newTarget, 'w+', "utf-8")
x = str(actionT(splitList[0], splitList[1]))
outTarget.write(x)
Essentially all this is supposed to be doing is building me a large amount of strings that look similar to this:
[日木曜 Deliverables]= CASE WHEN things = 11
THEN C ELSE 0 END
Are you using codecs.open()? Python 2.7's built-in open() does not support a specific encoding, meaning you have to manually encode non-ascii strings (as others have noted), but codecs.open() does support that and would probably be easier to drop in than manually encoding all the strings.
As you are actually using codecs.open(), going by your added code, and after a bit of looking things up myself, I suggest attempting to open the input and/or output file with encoding "utf-8-sig", which will automatically handle the BOM for UTF-8 (see http://docs.python.org/2/library/codecs.html#encodings-and-unicode, near the bottom of the section) I would think that would only matter for the input file, but if none of those combinations (utf-8-sig/utf-8, utf-8/utf-8-sig, utf-8-sig/utf-8-sig) work, then I believe the most likely situation would be that your input file is encoded in a different Unicode format with BOM, as Python's default UTF-8 codec interprets BOMs as regular characters so the input would not have an issue but output could.
Just noticed this, but... when you use codecs.open(), it expects a Unicode string, not an encoded one; try x = unicode(actionT(splitList[0], splitList[1])).
Your error can also occur when attempting to decode a unicode string (see http://wiki.python.org/moin/UnicodeEncodeError), but I don't think that should be happening unless actionT() or your list-splitting does something to the Unicode strings that causes them to be treated as non-Unicode strings.
In python 2.x there are two types of string: byte string and unicode string. First one contains bytes and last one - unicode code points. It is easy to determine, what type of string it is - unicode string starts with u:
# byte string
>>> 'abc'
'abc'
# unicode string:
>>> u'abc абв'
u'abc \u0430\u0431\u0432'
'abc' chars are the same, because the are in ASCII range. \u0430 is a unicode code point, it is out of ASCII range. "Code point" is python internal representation of unicode points, they can't be saved to file. It is needed to encode them to bytes first. Here how encoded unicode string looks like (as it is encoded, it becomes a byte string):
>>> s = u'abc абв'
>>> s.encode('utf8')
'abc \xd0\xb0\xd0\xb1\xd0\xb2'
This encoded string now can be written to file:
>>> s = u'abc абв'
>>> with open('text.txt', 'w+') as f:
... f.write(s.encode('utf8'))
Now, it is important to remember, what encoding we used when writing to file. Because to be able to read the data, we need to decode the content. Here what data looks like without decoding:
>>> with open('text.txt', 'r') as f:
... content = f.read()
>>> content
'abc \xd0\xb0\xd0\xb1\xd0\xb2'
You see, we've got encoded bytes, exactly the same as in s.encode('utf8'). To decode it is needed to provide coding name:
>>> content.decode('utf8')
u'abc \u0430\u0431\u0432'
After decode, we've got back our unicode string with unicode code points.
>>> print content.decode('utf8')
abc абв
xgord is right, but for further edification it's worth noting exactly what \ufeff means. It's known as a BOM or a byte order mark and basically it's a callback to the early days of unicode when people couldn't agree which way they wanted their unicode to go. Now all unicode documents are prefaced with either an \ufeff or an \uffef depending on which order they decide to arrange their bytes in.
If you hit an error on those characters in the first location you can be sure the issue is that you are not trying to decode it as utf-8, and the file is probably still fine.
My code just scrapes a web page, then converts it to Unicode.
html = urllib.urlopen(link).read()
html.encode("utf8","ignore")
self.response.out.write(html)
But I get a UnicodeDecodeError:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 507, in __call__
handler.get(*groups)
File "/Users/greg/clounce/main.py", line 55, in get
html.encode("utf8","ignore")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xa0 in position 2818: ordinal not in range(128)
I assume that means the HTML contains some wrongly-formed attempt at Unicode somewhere. Can I just drop whatever code bytes are causing the problem instead of getting an error?
>>> u'aあä'.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
'a'
Decode the string you get back, using either the charset in the the appropriate meta tag in the response or in the Content-Type header, then encode.
The method encode(encoding, errors) accepts custom handlers for errors. The default values, besides ignore, are:
>>> u'aあä'.encode('ascii', 'replace')
b'a??'
>>> u'aあä'.encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')
b'aあä'
>>> u'aあä'.encode('ascii', 'backslashreplace')
b'a\\u3042\\xe4'
See https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.encode
As an extension to Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams' answer
>>> u'aあä'.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
'a'
It is sometimes desirable to remove accents from characters and print the base form. This can be accomplished with
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', u'aあä').encode('ascii', 'ignore')
'aa'
You may also want to translate other characters (such as punctuation) to their nearest equivalents, for instance the RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK unicode character does not get converted to an ascii APOSTROPHE when encoding.
>>> print u'\u2019'
’
>>> unicodedata.name(u'\u2019')
'RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK'
>>> u'\u2019'.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
''
# Note we get an empty string back
>>> u'\u2019'.replace(u'\u2019', u'\'').encode('ascii', 'ignore')
"'"
Although there are more efficient ways to accomplish this. See this question for more details Where is Python's "best ASCII for this Unicode" database?
2018 Update:
As of February 2018, using compressions like gzip has become quite popular (around 73% of all websites use it, including large sites like Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange Network sites).
If you do a simple decode like in the original answer with a gzipped response, you'll get an error like or similar to this:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: unexpected code byte
In order to decode a gzpipped response you need to add the following modules (in Python 3):
import gzip
import io
Note: In Python 2 you'd use StringIO instead of io
Then you can parse the content out like this:
response = urlopen("https://example.com/gzipped-ressource")
buffer = io.BytesIO(response.read()) # Use StringIO.StringIO(response.read()) in Python 2
gzipped_file = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=buffer)
decoded = gzipped_file.read()
content = decoded.decode("utf-8") # Replace utf-8 with the source encoding of your requested resource
This code reads the response, and places the bytes in a buffer. The gzip module then reads the buffer using the GZipFile function. After that, the gzipped file can be read into bytes again and decoded to normally readable text in the end.
Original Answer from 2010:
Can we get the actual value used for link?
In addition, we usually encounter this problem here when we are trying to .encode() an already encoded byte string. So you might try to decode it first as in
html = urllib.urlopen(link).read()
unicode_str = html.decode(<source encoding>)
encoded_str = unicode_str.encode("utf8")
As an example:
html = '\xa0'
encoded_str = html.encode("utf8")
Fails with
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xa0 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
While:
html = '\xa0'
decoded_str = html.decode("windows-1252")
encoded_str = decoded_str.encode("utf8")
Succeeds without error. Do note that "windows-1252" is something I used as an example. I got this from chardet and it had 0.5 confidence that it is right! (well, as given with a 1-character-length string, what do you expect) You should change that to the encoding of the byte string returned from .urlopen().read() to what applies to the content you retrieved.
Another problem I see there is that the .encode() string method returns the modified string and does not modify the source in place. So it's kind of useless to have self.response.out.write(html) as html is not the encoded string from html.encode (if that is what you were originally aiming for).
As Ignacio suggested, check the source webpage for the actual encoding of the returned string from read(). It's either in one of the Meta tags or in the ContentType header in the response. Use that then as the parameter for .decode().
Do note however that it should not be assumed that other developers are responsible enough to make sure the header and/or meta character set declarations match the actual content. (Which is a PITA, yeah, I should know, I was one of those before).
Use unidecode - it even converts weird characters to ascii instantly, and even converts Chinese to phonetic ascii.
$ pip install unidecode
then:
>>> from unidecode import unidecode
>>> unidecode(u'北京')
'Bei Jing'
>>> unidecode(u'Škoda')
'Skoda'
I use this helper function throughout all of my projects. If it can't convert the unicode, it ignores it. This ties into a django library, but with a little research you could bypass it.
from django.utils import encoding
def convert_unicode_to_string(x):
"""
>>> convert_unicode_to_string(u'ni\xf1era')
'niera'
"""
return encoding.smart_str(x, encoding='ascii', errors='ignore')
I no longer get any unicode errors after using this.
For broken consoles like cmd.exe and HTML output you can always use:
my_unicode_string.encode('ascii','xmlcharrefreplace')
This will preserve all the non-ascii chars while making them printable in pure ASCII and in HTML.
WARNING: If you use this in production code to avoid errors then most likely there is something wrong in your code. The only valid use case for this is printing to a non-unicode console or easy conversion to HTML entities in an HTML context.
And finally, if you are on windows and use cmd.exe then you can type chcp 65001 to enable utf-8 output (works with Lucida Console font). You might need to add myUnicodeString.encode('utf8').
You wrote """I assume that means the HTML contains some wrongly-formed attempt at unicode somewhere."""
The HTML is NOT expected to contain any kind of "attempt at unicode", well-formed or not. It must of necessity contain Unicode characters encoded in some encoding, which is usually supplied up front ... look for "charset".
You appear to be assuming that the charset is UTF-8 ... on what grounds? The "\xA0" byte that is shown in your error message indicates that you may have a single-byte charset e.g. cp1252.
If you can't get any sense out of the declaration at the start of the HTML, try using chardet to find out what the likely encoding is.
Why have you tagged your question with "regex"?
Update after you replaced your whole question with a non-question:
html = urllib.urlopen(link).read()
# html refers to a str object. To get unicode, you need to find out
# how it is encoded, and decode it.
html.encode("utf8","ignore")
# problem 1: will fail because html is a str object;
# encode works on unicode objects so Python tries to decode it using
# 'ascii' and fails
# problem 2: even if it worked, the result will be ignored; it doesn't
# update html in situ, it returns a function result.
# problem 3: "ignore" with UTF-n: any valid unicode object
# should be encodable in UTF-n; error implies end of the world,
# don't try to ignore it. Don't just whack in "ignore" willy-nilly,
# put it in only with a comment explaining your very cogent reasons for doing so.
# "ignore" with most other encodings: error implies that you are mistaken
# in your choice of encoding -- same advice as for UTF-n :-)
# "ignore" with decode latin1 aka iso-8859-1: error implies end of the world.
# Irrespective of error or not, you are probably mistaken
# (needing e.g. cp1252 or even cp850 instead) ;-)
If you have a string line, you can use the .encode([encoding], [errors='strict']) method for strings to convert encoding types.
line = 'my big string'
line.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
For more information about handling ASCII and unicode in Python, this is a really useful site: https://docs.python.org/2/howto/unicode.html
I think the answer is there but only in bits and pieces, which makes it difficult to quickly fix the problem such as
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xa0 in position 2818: ordinal not in range(128)
Let's take an example, Suppose I have file which has some data in the following form ( containing ascii and non-ascii chars )
1/10/17, 21:36 - Land : Welcome ��
and we want to ignore and preserve only ascii characters.
This code will do:
import unicodedata
fp = open(<FILENAME>)
for line in fp:
rline = line.strip()
rline = unicode(rline, "utf-8")
rline = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', rline).encode('ascii','ignore')
if len(rline) != 0:
print rline
and type(rline) will give you
>type(rline)
<type 'str'>
unicodestring = '\xa0'
decoded_str = unicodestring.decode("windows-1252")
encoded_str = decoded_str.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
Works for me
You can use the following piece of code as an example to avoid Unicode to ASCII errors:
from anyascii import anyascii
content = "Base Rent for – CC# 2100 Acct# 8410: $41,667.00 – PO – Lines - for Feb to Dec to receive monthly"
content = anyascii(content)
print(content)
Looks like you are using python 2.x.
Python 2.x defaults to ascii and it doesn’t know about Unicode. Hence the exception.
Just paste the below line after shebang, it will work
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-