Develop Reference

python - UnicodeEncodeError, need fix

I am trying to use a simple python print statement.
print('这是')
But I am getting these issues.
I am using windows. Atom IDE. python 3.6.5
Regards,
Bhanu.

Add # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- to the top of your python script
Also, add the letter u before your string's opening quote:
print(u'这是')
Should work now. Will update with some more background to this VERY common stumbling block of strings, raw strings, Unicode, bytes, ASCII, encoding, decoding, etc.

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.

Setting default encoding Openerp/Python

Do you guys know how to change the default encoding of an openerp file?
I've tried adding # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- but it doesn't work (is there a setup that ignore this command? just a wild guess). When I try to execute sys.getdefaultencoding() still its in ASCII.
Regards

The comment # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- tells the python parser the encoding of the source file. It affects how the bytecode compiler converts unicode literals in the source code. It has no effect on the runtime environment.
You should explicitly define the encoding when converting strings to unicode. If you are getting UnicodeDecodeError, post your problem scenario and I'll try to help.

Where does this come from: -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Python recognizes the following as instruction which defines file's encoding:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
I definitely saw this kind of instructions before (-*- var: value -*-). Where does it come from? What is the full specification, e.g. can the value include spaces, special symbols, newlines, even -*- itself?
My program will be writing plain text files and I'd like to include some metadata in them using this format.

This way of specifying the encoding of a Python file comes from PEP 0263 - Defining Python Source Code Encodings.
It is also recognized by GNU Emacs (see Python Language Reference, 2.1.4 Encoding declarations), though I don't know if it was the first program to use that syntax.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- is a Python 2 thing.
In Python 3.0+ the default encoding of source files is already UTF-8 so you can safely delete that line, because unless it says something other than some variation of "utf-8", it has no effect. See Should I use encoding declaration in Python 3?
pyupgrade is a tool you can run on your code to remove those comments and other useless leftovers from Python 2, like having all your classes inherit from object.

This is so called file local variables, that are understood by Emacs and set correspondingly. See corresponding section in Emacs manual - you can define them either in header or in footer of file

In PyCharm, I'd leave it out. It turns off the UTF-8 indicator at the bottom with a warning that the encoding is hard-coded. Don't think you need the PyCharm comment mentioned above.