Develop Reference

Why am I keep getting a UnicodeDecodeError in pandas read_csv() function even though I specified the correct encoding parameter? [duplicate]

Why is the below item failing? Why does it succeed with "latin-1" codec?
o = "a test of \xe9 char" #I want this to remain a string as this is what I am receiving
v = o.decode("utf-8")
Which results in:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\utf_8.py",
line 16, in decode
return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeDecodeError:
'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 10: invalid continuation byte

I had the same error when I tried to open a CSV file by pandas.read_csv
method.
The solution was change the encoding to latin-1:
pd.read_csv('ml-100k/u.item', sep='|', names=m_cols , encoding='latin-1')

In binary, 0xE9 looks like 1110 1001. If you read about UTF-8 on Wikipedia, you’ll see that such a byte must be followed by two of the form 10xx xxxx. So, for example:
>>> b'\xe9\x80\x80'.decode('utf-8')
u'\u9000'
But that’s just the mechanical cause of the exception. In this case, you have a string that is almost certainly encoded in latin 1. You can see how UTF-8 and latin 1 look different:
>>> u'\xe9'.encode('utf-8')
b'\xc3\xa9'
>>> u'\xe9'.encode('latin-1')
b'\xe9'
(Note, I'm using a mix of Python 2 and 3 representation here. The input is valid in any version of Python, but your Python interpreter is unlikely to actually show both unicode and byte strings in this way.)

It is invalid UTF-8. That character is the e-acute character in ISO-Latin1, which is why it succeeds with that codeset.
If you don't know the codeset you're receiving strings in, you're in a bit of trouble. It would be best if a single codeset (hopefully UTF-8) would be chosen for your protocol/application and then you'd just reject ones that didn't decode.
If you can't do that, you'll need heuristics.

Because UTF-8 is multibyte and there is no char corresponding to your combination of \xe9 plus following space.
Why should it succeed in both utf-8 and latin-1?
Here how the same sentence should be in utf-8:
>>> o.decode('latin-1').encode("utf-8")
'a test of \xc3\xa9 char'

If this error arises when manipulating a file that was just opened, check to see if you opened it in 'rb' mode

Use this, If it shows the error of UTF-8
pd.read_csv('File_name.csv',encoding='latin-1')

utf-8 code error usually comes when the range of numeric values exceeding 0 to 127.
the reason to raise this exception is:
1)If the code point is < 128, each byte is the same as the value of the code point.
2)If the code point is 128 or greater, the Unicode string can’t be represented in this encoding. (Python raises a UnicodeEncodeError exception in this case.)
In order to to overcome this we have a set of encodings, the most widely used is "Latin-1, also known as ISO-8859-1"
So ISO-8859-1 Unicode points 0–255 are identical to the Latin-1 values, so converting to this encoding simply requires converting code points to byte values; if a code point larger than 255 is encountered, the string can’t be encoded into Latin-1
when this exception occurs when you are trying to load a data set ,try using this format
df=pd.read_csv("top50.csv",encoding='ISO-8859-1')
Add encoding technique at the end of the syntax which then accepts to load the data set.

Well this type of error comes when u are taking input a particular file or data in pandas such as :-
data=pd.read_csv('/kaggle/input/fertilizers-by-product-fao/FertilizersProduct.csv)
Then the error is displaying like this :-
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xf4 in position 1: invalid continuation byte
So to avoid this type of error can be removed by adding an argument
data=pd.read_csv('/kaggle/input/fertilizers-by-product-fao/FertilizersProduct.csv', encoding='ISO-8859-1')

This happened to me also, while i was reading text containing Hebrew from a .txt file.
I clicked: file -> save as and I saved this file as a UTF-8 encoding

TLDR: I would recommend investigating the source of the problem in depth before switching encoders to silence the error.
I got this error as I was processing a large number of zip files with additional zip files in them.
My workflow was the following:
Read zip
Read child zip
Read text from child zip
At some point I was hitting the encoding error above. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that some child zips erroneously contained further zips. Reading these zips as text lead to some funky character representation that I could silence with encoding="latin-1", but which in turn caused issues further down the line. Since I was working with international data it was not completely foolish to assume it was an encoding problem (I had problems with 0xc2: Â), but in the end it was not the actual issue.

In this case, I tried to execute a .py which active a path/file.sql.
My solution was to modify the codification of the file.sql to "UTF-8 without BOM" and it works!
You can do it with Notepad++.
i will leave a part of my code.
con = psycopg2.connect(host = sys.argv[1],
port = sys.argv[2],dbname = sys.argv[3],user = sys.argv[4], password = sys.argv[5])
cursor = con.cursor()
sqlfile = open(path, 'r')

I encountered this problem, and it turned out that I had saved my CSV directly from a google sheets file. In other words, I was in a google sheet file. I chose, save a copy, and then when my browser downloaded it, I chose Open. Then, I DIRECTLY saved the CSV. This was the wrong move.
What fixed it for me was first saving the sheet as an .xlsx file on my local computer, and from there exporting single sheet as .csv. Then the error went away for pd.read_csv('myfile.csv')

The solution was change to "UTF-8 sin BOM"

Python3 using UTF-8 data from bytes [duplicate]

Why is the below item failing? Why does it succeed with "latin-1" codec?
o = "a test of \xe9 char" #I want this to remain a string as this is what I am receiving
v = o.decode("utf-8")
Which results in:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\utf_8.py",
line 16, in decode
return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeDecodeError:
'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 10: invalid continuation byte

I had the same error when I tried to open a CSV file by pandas.read_csv
method.
The solution was change the encoding to latin-1:
pd.read_csv('ml-100k/u.item', sep='|', names=m_cols , encoding='latin-1')

In binary, 0xE9 looks like 1110 1001. If you read about UTF-8 on Wikipedia, you’ll see that such a byte must be followed by two of the form 10xx xxxx. So, for example:
>>> b'\xe9\x80\x80'.decode('utf-8')
u'\u9000'
But that’s just the mechanical cause of the exception. In this case, you have a string that is almost certainly encoded in latin 1. You can see how UTF-8 and latin 1 look different:
>>> u'\xe9'.encode('utf-8')
b'\xc3\xa9'
>>> u'\xe9'.encode('latin-1')
b'\xe9'
(Note, I'm using a mix of Python 2 and 3 representation here. The input is valid in any version of Python, but your Python interpreter is unlikely to actually show both unicode and byte strings in this way.)

It is invalid UTF-8. That character is the e-acute character in ISO-Latin1, which is why it succeeds with that codeset.
If you don't know the codeset you're receiving strings in, you're in a bit of trouble. It would be best if a single codeset (hopefully UTF-8) would be chosen for your protocol/application and then you'd just reject ones that didn't decode.
If you can't do that, you'll need heuristics.

Because UTF-8 is multibyte and there is no char corresponding to your combination of \xe9 plus following space.
Why should it succeed in both utf-8 and latin-1?
Here how the same sentence should be in utf-8:
>>> o.decode('latin-1').encode("utf-8")
'a test of \xc3\xa9 char'

If this error arises when manipulating a file that was just opened, check to see if you opened it in 'rb' mode

Use this, If it shows the error of UTF-8
pd.read_csv('File_name.csv',encoding='latin-1')

utf-8 code error usually comes when the range of numeric values exceeding 0 to 127.
the reason to raise this exception is:
1)If the code point is < 128, each byte is the same as the value of the code point.
2)If the code point is 128 or greater, the Unicode string can’t be represented in this encoding. (Python raises a UnicodeEncodeError exception in this case.)
In order to to overcome this we have a set of encodings, the most widely used is "Latin-1, also known as ISO-8859-1"
So ISO-8859-1 Unicode points 0–255 are identical to the Latin-1 values, so converting to this encoding simply requires converting code points to byte values; if a code point larger than 255 is encountered, the string can’t be encoded into Latin-1
when this exception occurs when you are trying to load a data set ,try using this format
df=pd.read_csv("top50.csv",encoding='ISO-8859-1')
Add encoding technique at the end of the syntax which then accepts to load the data set.

Well this type of error comes when u are taking input a particular file or data in pandas such as :-
data=pd.read_csv('/kaggle/input/fertilizers-by-product-fao/FertilizersProduct.csv)
Then the error is displaying like this :-
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xf4 in position 1: invalid continuation byte
So to avoid this type of error can be removed by adding an argument
data=pd.read_csv('/kaggle/input/fertilizers-by-product-fao/FertilizersProduct.csv', encoding='ISO-8859-1')

This happened to me also, while i was reading text containing Hebrew from a .txt file.
I clicked: file -> save as and I saved this file as a UTF-8 encoding

TLDR: I would recommend investigating the source of the problem in depth before switching encoders to silence the error.
I got this error as I was processing a large number of zip files with additional zip files in them.
My workflow was the following:
Read zip
Read child zip
Read text from child zip
At some point I was hitting the encoding error above. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that some child zips erroneously contained further zips. Reading these zips as text lead to some funky character representation that I could silence with encoding="latin-1", but which in turn caused issues further down the line. Since I was working with international data it was not completely foolish to assume it was an encoding problem (I had problems with 0xc2: Â), but in the end it was not the actual issue.

In this case, I tried to execute a .py which active a path/file.sql.
My solution was to modify the codification of the file.sql to "UTF-8 without BOM" and it works!
You can do it with Notepad++.
i will leave a part of my code.
con = psycopg2.connect(host = sys.argv[1],
port = sys.argv[2],dbname = sys.argv[3],user = sys.argv[4], password = sys.argv[5])
cursor = con.cursor()
sqlfile = open(path, 'r')

I encountered this problem, and it turned out that I had saved my CSV directly from a google sheets file. In other words, I was in a google sheet file. I chose, save a copy, and then when my browser downloaded it, I chose Open. Then, I DIRECTLY saved the CSV. This was the wrong move.
What fixed it for me was first saving the sheet as an .xlsx file on my local computer, and from there exporting single sheet as .csv. Then the error went away for pd.read_csv('myfile.csv')

The solution was change to "UTF-8 sin BOM"

Python 2.7: Printing out an decoded string

I have an file that is called: Abrázame.txt
I want to decode this so that python understands what this 'á' char is so that it will print me Abrázame.txt
This is the following code i have on an Scratch file:
import os
s = os.path.join(r'C:\Test\AutoTest', os.listdir(r'C:\\Test\\AutoTest')[0])
print(unicode(s.decode(encoding='utf-16', errors='strict')))
The error i get from above is:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:/Users/naythan_onfri/.PyCharmCE2017.2/config/scratches/scratch_3.py", line 12, in <module>
print(unicode(s.decode(encoding='utf-16', errors='strict')))
File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\utf_16.py", line 16, in decode
return codecs.utf_16_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf16' codec can't decode byte 0x74 in position 28: truncated data
I have looked up the utf-16 character set and it does indeed have 'á' character in it. So why is it that this string cannot be decoded with Utf-16.
Also i know that 'latin-1' will work and produce the string im looking for however since this is for an automation project and i wanting to ensure that any filename with any registered character can be decoded and used for other things within the project for example:
"Opening up file explorer at the directory of the file with the file already selected."
Is looping through each of the codecs(Mind you i believe there is 93 codecs) to find whichever one can decode the string, the best way of getting the result I'm looking for? I figure there something far better than that solution.

You want to decode at the edge when you first read a string so that you don't have surprises later in your code. At the edge, you have some reasonable chance of guessing what that encoding is. For this code, the edge is
os.listdir(r'C:\\Test\\AutoTest')[0]
and you can get the current file system directory encoding. So,
import sys
fs_encoding = sys.getfilesystemencoding()
s = os.path.join(r'C:\Test\AutoTest',
os.listdir(r'C:\\Test\\AutoTest')[0].decode(encoding=fs_encodig, errors='strict')
print(s)
Note that once you decode you have a unicode string and you don't need to build a new unicode() object from it.
latin-1 works if that's your current code page. Its an interesting curiosity that even though Windows has supported "wide" characters with "W" versions of their API for many years, python 2 is single-byte character based and doesn't use them.
Long live python 3.

Python3: Why i'm getting a UnicodeDecodeError or is this a Memory issue?

I'm writing a program to iterate my Robocopy-Log (>25 MB). It's by far not ready, cause I'm stuck with a problem.
The problem is that after iterating ~1700 lines of my log -> I get an "UnicodeError":
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:/Users/xxxxxx.xxxxxx/SkyDrive/#Python/del_robo2.py", line 6, in <module>
for line in data:
File "C:\Python33\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 23, in decode
return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x81 in position 7869: character maps to <undefined>
The program looks as follows:
x="Error"
y=1
arry = []
data = open("Ausstellungen.txt",mode="r")
for line in data:
arry = line.split("\t")
print(y)
y=y+1
if x in arry:
print("found")
print(line)
data.close()
If I reduce the txt file to 1000 lines then the program works.
If I delete line 1500 to 3000 and run again, I get again the unicode error around line 1700.
So have I made an error or is this some memory limiting problem of Python?

Given your data & snippet, I would be surprised if this is a memory issue. It's more likely the encoding: Python is using your system's default encoding to read the file, which is "cp1252" (the default MS Windows encoding), but the file contains byte sequences/bytes which cannot be decoded in that encoding. A candidate for the file's actual encoding might be "latin-1", which you can make Python 3 use by saying
open("Ausstellungen.txt",mode="r", encoding="latin-1")
A possibly similar issue is Python 3 chokes on CP-1252/ANSI reading. A nice talk about the whole thing is here: http://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html

Python decodes all file data to Unicode values. You didn't specify an encoding to use, so Python uses the default for your system, the cp1252 Windows Latin codepage.
However, that is the wrong encoding for your file data. You need to specify an explicit codec to use:
data = open("Ausstellungen.txt",mode="r", encoding='UTF8')
What encoding to use exactly, is unfortunately something you need to figure out yourself. I used UTF-8 as an example codec.
Be aware that some versions of RoboCopy have problems producing valid output.
If you don't yet know what Unicode is, or want to know about encodings, see:
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky
The Python Unicode HOWTO
Pragmatic Unicode by Ned Batchelder
The reason you see the error crop up for different parts of your file is that your data contains more than one codepoint that the cp1252 encoding cannot handle.

Python Encoding\Decoding for writing to a text file

I've honestly spent a lot of time on this, and it's slowly killing me. I've stripped content from a PDF and stored it in an array. Now I'm trying to pull it back out of the array and write it into a txt file. However, I do not seem to be able to make it happen because of encoding issues.
allTheNTMs.append(contentRaw[s1:].encode("utf-8"))
for a in range(len(allTheNTMs)):
kmlDescription = allTheNTMs[a]
print kmlDescription #this prints out fine
outputFile.write(kmlDescription)
The error i'm getting is "unicodedecodeerror: ascii codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 213:ordinal not in range (128).
I'm just messing around now, but I've tried all kinds of ways to get this stuff to write out.
outputFile.write(kmlDescription).decode('utf-8')
Please forgive me if this is basic, I'm still learning Python (2.7).
Cheers!
EDIT1: Sample data looks something like the following:
Chart 3686 (plan, Morehead City) [ previous update 4997/11 ] NAD83 DATUM
Insert the accompanying block, showing amendments to coastline,
depths and dolphins, centred on: 34° 41´·19N., 76° 40´·43W.
Delete R 34° 43´·16N., 76° 41´·64W.
When I add the print type(raw), I get
Edit 2: When I just try to write the data, I receive the original error message (ascii codec can't decode byte...)
I will check out the suggested thread and video. Thanks folks!
Edit 3: I'm using Python 2.7
Edit 4: agf hit the nail on the head in the comments below when (s)he noticed that I was double encoding. I tried intentionally double encoding a string that had previously been working and produced the same error message that was originally thrown. Something like:
text = "Here's a string, but imagine it has some weird symbols and whatnot in it - apparently latin-1"
textEncoded = text.encode('utf-8')
textEncodedX2 = textEncoded.encode('utf-8')
outputfile.write(textEncoded) #Works!
outputfile.write(textEncodedX2) #failed
Once I figured out I was trying to double encode, the solution was the following:
allTheNTMs.append(contentRaw[s1:].encode("utf-8"))
for a in range(len(allTheNTMs)):
kmlDescription = allTheNTMs[a]
kmlDescriptionDecode = kmlDescription.decode("latin-1")
outputFile.write(kmlDescriptionDecode)
It's working now, and I sure appreciate all of your help!!

My guess is that output file you have opened has been opened with latin1 or even utf-8 codec hence you are not able to write utf-8 encoded data to that because it tries to reconvert it, otherwise to a normally opened file you can write any arbitrary data string, here is an example recreating similar error
u = u'सच्चिदानन्द हीरानन्द वात्स्यायन '
s = u.encode('utf-8')
f = codecs.open('del.text', 'wb',encoding='latin1')
f.write(s)
output:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/wingide4.1/src/debug/tserver/_sandbox.py", line 1, in <module>
# Used internally for debug sandbox under external interpreter
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 691, in write
return self.writer.write(data)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 351, in write
data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe0 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
Solution:
this will work, if you don't set any codec
f = open('del.txt', 'wb')
f.write(s)
other option is to directly write to file without encoding the unicode strings, if outputFile has been opened with correct codec e.g.
f = codecs.open('del.text', 'wb',encoding='utf-8')
f.write(u)

Your error message doesn't seem to appear to relate to any of your Python syntax but actually the fact you're trying to decode a Hex value which has no equivalent in UTF-8.
HEX 0xc2 appears to represent a latin character - an uppercase A with an accent on the top. Therefore, instead of using "allTheNTMs.append(contentRaw[s1:].encode("utf-8"))", try:-
allTheNTMs.append(contentRaw[s1:].encode("latin-1"))
I'm not an expert in Python so this may not work but it would appear you're trying to encode a latin character. Given the error message you are receiving too, it would appear that when trying to encode in UTF-8, Python only looks through the first 128 entries given that your error appears to indicate that entry "0Xc2" is out of range which indeed it is out of the first 128 entries of UTF-8.