Develop Reference

unicode error printing \u2002 using Python 3

I am getting the error that Python can't decode character \u2002 when trying to print a block of text:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2002' in position 355: character maps to <undefined>
What i don't understand is that, as far as i can tell, this is a unicode character (i.e. the EN SPACE character), so not sure why not printing.
For reference, the content was read in using file_content = open (file_name, encoding="utf8")

Works for me! (on a linux teminal)
>>> print("\u2002")
It's an invisible as it's EN_SPACE
If you are on windows however you are likely using codepage 125X in your terminal and...
>>> "\u2002".encode("cp1250")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/encodings/cp1250.py", line 12, in encode
return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_table)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2002' in position 0: character maps to <undefined>

There is no problem using that character in Unicode (as a unicode string in Python). But when you write it out ("print it") it needs to be encoded into an encoding. Some encodings don't support some characters. The encoding you are using to print does not support that particular character.
Probably you are using the Windows console which typically uses a codepage like 850 or 437 which doesn't include this character.
There are ways to change the Windows console codepage (chcp) or you could try in Idle or some other IDE

Why does str.encode('utf-8') produce UnicodeDecodeError in my python script?

When running the following code (which just prints out file names):
print filename
It throws the following error:
File "myscript.py", line 78, in __listfilenames
print filename
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 13: ordinal not in range(128)
So to fix this, I tried changing print filename to print filename.encode('utf-8') which didn't fix the problem.
The script only fails when trying read a filename such as Coé.jpg.
Any ideas how I can modify filename so the script continues to work when it comes acorss a special character?
NB. I'm a python noob

filename is already encoded. It is already a byte string and doesn't need encoding again.
But since you asked it to be encoded, Python first has to decode it for you, and it can only do that with the default ASCII encoding. That implicit decoding fails:
>>> 'Coé.jpg'
'Co\xc3\xa9.jpg'
>>> 'Coé.jpg'.decode('utf8')
u'Co\xe9.jpg'
>>> 'Coé.jpg'.decode('utf8').encode('utf8')
'Co\xc3\xa9.jpg'
>>> 'Coé.jpg'.encode('utf8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)
If you wanted encoded bytestrings, you don't have to do any encoding at all. Remove the .encode('utf8').
You probably need to read up on Python and Unicode. I recommend:
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky
Pragmatic Unicode by Ned Batchelder
The Python Unicode HOWTO
The rule of thumb is: decode as early as you can, encode as late as you can. That means when you receive data, decode to Unicode objects, when you need to pass that information to something else, encode only then. Many APIs can do the decoding and encoding as part of their job; print will encode to the codec used by the terminal, for example.

Python encode utf? iso-8859-1?

I am trying to print an element in terminal, with:
print y['value'].decode('iso-8859-1').encode('utf8')
but the text keeps printing all messed up, as in:
LATICÍNIOS LACTVIT LIMITADA
or
PETR├â┬ôPOLIS (which should read PETRÓPOLIS)
what am I doing wrong and how do you suggest I fix it? Thanks!
If I just do:
print i['value']
I will get:
File "C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.1\lib\encodings\cp437.py", line 12, in encode
return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_map)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\xd3' in position 4
: character maps to

(python)In my database mix some wrong ascii code, how to converte those string without errors

In my database mix some wrong ascii code, how to make concatenate those string without errors?
my example situation is like(some ascii character is larger than 128):
>>> s=b'\xb0'
>>> addstr='read '+s
>>> print addstr
read ░
>>> addstr.encode('ascii','ignore')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xb0 in position 5: ordinal
not in range(128)
>>> addstr.encode('utf_8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xb0 in position 5: ordinal
not in range(128)
I can do:
>>> addstr.decode("windows-1252").encode('utf-8')
'read \xc2\xb0'
but you can see the windows-1252 coding will change my character.
I would like convert the addstr to unicode? how to do it?

addstrUnicode = addstr.decode("unicode-escape")
You should not be concerned about the character changing, it is just that the utf-8 encoding requires two bytes, not one byte, for characters between 0x80 and 0x7FF, so when you encode as utf-8, an extra byte (0xC2) is added.
This is a useful link to read to help understand different types of encodings.
Additionally, make sure you know the original encoding of the character before you start trying to decode it. While you mentioned that it was "ascii code", the ascii character set only extends up to 127, which means the character cannot be ascii-encoded. I'm assuming here it's just Unicode point \u00B0.

printing hebrew in python works in eclipse but not shell

I have some code that converts a Unicode representation of hebrew text file into hebrew for display
for example:
f = open(sys.argv[1])
for line in f:
print eval('u"' + line +'"')
This works fun when I run it in PyDev (eclipse), but when I run it from the command line, I get
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode characters in position 9-10: ordinal not in range(256)
An example line from the input file is:
\u05d9\u05d5\u05dd
What is the problem? How can I solve this?

Do not use eval(); instead use the unicode_escape codec to interpret that data:
for line in f:
line = line.decode('unicode_escape')
The unicode_escape encoding interprets \uabcd character sequences the same way Python would when parsing a unicode literal in the source code:
>>> '\u05d9\u05d5\u05dd'.decode('unicode_escape')
u'\u05d9\u05d5\u05dd'
The exception you see is not caused by the eval() statement though; I suspect it is being caused by an attempt to print the result instead. Python will try to encode unicode values automatically and will detect what encoding the current terminal uses.
Your Eclipse output window uses a different encoding from your terminal; if the latter is configured to support Latin-1 then you'll see that exact exception, as Python tries to encode Hebrew codepoints to an encoding that doesn't support those:
>>> u'\u05d9\u05d5\u05dd'.encode('latin1')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode characters in position 0-2: ordinal not in range(256)
The solution is to reconfigure your terminal (UTF-8 would be a good choice), or to not print unicode values with codepoints that cannot be encoded to Latin-1.
If you are redirecting output from Python to a file, then Python cannot determine the output encoding automatically. In that case you can use the PYTHONIOENCODING environment variable to tell Python what encoding to use for standard I/O:
PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 python yourscript.py > outputfile.txt

Thank you, this solved my problem.
line.decode('unicode_escape')
did the trick.
Followup - This now works, but if I try to send the output to a file:
python myScript.py > textfile.txt
The file itself has the error:
'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 42-44: ordinal not in range(128)