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 -*-
Related
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.
Here are my attempts with error messages. What am I doing wrong?
string.decode("ascii", "ignore")
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in
position 37: ordinal not in range(128)
string.encode('utf-8', "ignore")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position
37: ordinal not in range(128)
You can't decode a unicode, and you can't encode a str. Try doing it the other way around.
Guessing at all the things omitted from the original question, but, assuming Python 2.x the key is to read the error messages carefully: in particular where you call 'encode' but the message says 'decode' and vice versa, but also the types of the values included in the messages.
In the first example string is of type unicode and you attempted to decode it which is an operation converting a byte string to unicode. Python helpfully attempted to convert the unicode value to str using the default 'ascii' encoding but since your string contained a non-ascii character you got the error which says that Python was unable to encode a unicode value. Here's an example which shows the type of the input string:
>>> u"\xa0".decode("ascii", "ignore")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#7>", line 1, in <module>
u"\xa0".decode("ascii", "ignore")
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
In the second case you do the reverse attempting to encode a byte string. Encoding is an operation that converts unicode to a byte string so Python helpfully attempts to convert your byte string to unicode first and, since you didn't give it an ascii string the default ascii decoder fails:
>>> "\xc2".encode("ascii", "ignore")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>
"\xc2".encode("ascii", "ignore")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
Aside from getting decode and encode backwards, I think part of the answer here is actually don't use the ascii encoding. It's probably not what you want.
To begin with, think of str like you would a plain text file. It's just a bunch of bytes with no encoding actually attached to it. How it's interpreted is up to whatever piece of code is reading it. If you don't know what this paragraph is talking about, go read Joel's The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets right now before you go any further.
Naturally, we're all aware of the mess that created. The answer is to, at least within memory, have a standard encoding for all strings. That's where unicode comes in. I'm having trouble tracking down exactly what encoding Python uses internally for sure, but it doesn't really matter just for this. The point is that you know it's a sequence of bytes that are interpreted a certain way. So you only need to think about the characters themselves, and not the bytes.
The problem is that in practice, you run into both. Some libraries give you a str, and some expect a str. Certainly that makes sense whenever you're streaming a series of bytes (such as to or from disk or over a web request). So you need to be able to translate back and forth.
Enter codecs: it's the translation library between these two data types. You use encode to generate a sequence of bytes (str) from a text string (unicode), and you use decode to get a text string (unicode) from a sequence of bytes (str).
For example:
>>> s = "I look like a string, but I'm actually a sequence of bytes. \xe2\x9d\xa4"
>>> codecs.decode(s, 'utf-8')
u"I look like a string, but I'm actually a sequence of bytes. \u2764"
What happened here? I gave Python a sequence of bytes, and then I told it, "Give me the unicode version of this, given that this sequence of bytes is in 'utf-8'." It did as I asked, and those bytes (a heart character) are now treated as a whole, represented by their Unicode codepoint.
Let's go the other way around:
>>> u = u"I'm a string! Really! \u2764"
>>> codecs.encode(u, 'utf-8')
"I'm a string! Really! \xe2\x9d\xa4"
I gave Python a Unicode string, and I asked it to translate the string into a sequence of bytes using the 'utf-8' encoding. So it did, and now the heart is just a bunch of bytes it can't print as ASCII; so it shows me the hexadecimal instead.
We can work with other encodings, too, of course:
>>> s = "I have a section \xa7"
>>> codecs.decode(s, 'latin1')
u'I have a section \xa7'
>>> codecs.decode(s, 'latin1')[-1] == u'\u00A7'
True
>>> u = u"I have a section \u00a7"
>>> u
u'I have a section \xa7'
>>> codecs.encode(u, 'latin1')
'I have a section \xa7'
('\xa7' is the section character, in both
Unicode and Latin-1.)
So for your question, you first need to figure out what encoding your str is in.
Did it come from a file? From a web request? From your database? Then the source determines the encoding. Find out the encoding of the source and use that to translate it into a unicode.
s = [get from external source]
u = codecs.decode(s, 'utf-8') # Replace utf-8 with the actual input encoding
Or maybe you're trying to write it out somewhere. What encoding does the destination expect? Use that to translate it into a str. UTF-8 is a good choice for plain text documents; most things can read it.
u = u'My string'
s = codecs.encode(u, 'utf-8') # Replace utf-8 with the actual output encoding
[Write s out somewhere]
Are you just translating back and forth in memory for interoperability or something? Then just pick an encoding and stick with it; 'utf-8' is probably the best choice for that:
u = u'My string'
s = codecs.encode(u, 'utf-8')
newu = codecs.decode(s, 'utf-8')
In modern programming, you probably never want to use the 'ascii' encoding for any of this. It's an extremely small subset of all possible characters, and no system I know of uses it by default or anything.
Python 3 does its best to make this immensely clearer simply by changing the names. In Python 3, str was replaced with bytes, and unicode was replaced with str.
That's because your input string can’t be converted according to the encoding rules (strict by default).
I don't know, but I always encoded using directly unicode() constructor, at least that's the ways at the official documentation:
unicode(your_str, errors="ignore")
The following code works correctly:
from jinja2 import Template
mylist = ['some text \xc3']
template = Template('{{ list }}')
print template.render(list=mylist)
When I run it, it outputs:
['some text \xc3']
Yet, when I try to print the actual list element, it fails:
template = Template('{{ list[0] }}')
print template.render(list=mylist)
The error is:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 10: ordinal not in range(128)
I would like to find a way to print the individual list element in the same way that the whole list is printed, where the non-ascii character is represented with the \x notation.
From Jinja docs:
"Jinja2 is using Unicode internally which means that you have to pass Unicode objects to the render function or bytestrings that only consist of ASCII characters."
mylist = [u'some text \xc3']
You should never open an encoded file and not decode it.
You should either read the encoding from curl (e.g. with -i or -H option) and parse the HTTP headers or the output file if the encoding is not specified in the headers.
Or as an alternative to curl you can use the requests library which don't require writing to a file. Fetching a web resource will look like:
>>> r = requests.get('http://python.org')
>>> r.content
'<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML...
Where content is already encoded following the HTTP specification.
As an last approach you could guess an encoding and replace unknown chars. This would be the most easy solution to implement. For example:
with codecs.open(filename, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace') as fobj:
...
Your approach will always loose information (if there are non ascii chars). My first two approaches never and the last one only if the guessed encoding is wrong.
I figured it out. The key is to do str.encode('string-escape')
So, I did this:
template = Template('{{ list[0].encode("string-escape") }}')
And that worked.
jla is right for my case.
I use utf-8 for the python source files, so use u prefix sovled my problem.
I am a newbie in python.
I have a unicode in Tamil.
When I use the sys.getdefaultencoding() I get the output as "Cp1252"
My requirement is that when I use text = testString.decode("utf-8") I get the error "UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters in position 0-8: character maps to undefined"
When I use the
sys.getdefaultencoding() I get the
output as "Cp1252"
Two comments on that: (1) it's "cp1252", not "Cp1252". Don't type from memory. (2) Whoever caused sys.getdefaultencoding() to produce "cp1252" should be told politely that that's not a very good idea.
As for the rest, let me guess. You have a unicode object that contains some text in the Tamil language. You try, erroneously, to decode it. Decode means to convert from a str object to a unicode object. Unfortunately you don't have a str object, and even more unfortunately you get bounced by one of the very few awkish/perlish warts in Python 2: it tries to make a str object by encoding your unicode string using the system default encoding. If that's 'ascii' or 'cp1252', encoding will fail. That's why you get a Unicode*En*codeError instead of a Unicode*De*codeError.
Short answer: do text = testString.encode("utf-8"), if that's what you really want to do. Otherwise please explain what you want to do, and show us the result of print repr(testString).
add this as your 1st line of code
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
later in your code...
text = unicode(testString,"UTF-8")
you need to know which character-encoding is testString using. if not utf8, an error will occur when using decode('utf8').
I'm trying to get Mako render some string with unicode characters :
tempLook=TemplateLookup(..., default_filters=[], input_encoding='utf8',output_encoding='utf-8', encoding_errors='replace')
...
print sys.stdout.encoding
uname=cherrypy.session['userName']
print uname
kwargs['_toshow']=uname
...
return tempLook.get_template(page).render(**kwargs)
The related template file :
...${_toshow}...
And the output is :
UTF-8
Deşghfkskhü
...
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
I don't think there's any problem with the string itself since I can print it just fine.
Altough I've played (a lot) with input/output_encoding and default_filters parameters, it always complains about being unable to decode/encode with ascii codec.
So I decided to try out the example found on the documentation, and the following works the "best" :
input_encoding='utf-8', output_encoding='utf-8'
#(note : it still raised an error without output_encoding, despite tutorial not implying it)
With
${u"voix m’a réveillé."}
And the result being
voix mâ�a réveillé
I simply don't get why this doesn't work. "Magic encoding comment"s don't work either. All the files are encoded with UTF-8.
I've spent hours to no avail, am I missing something ?
Update :
I have a simpler question now :
Now that all the variables are unicode, how can I get Mako to render unicode strings without applying anything ? Passing a blank filter / render_unicode() doesn't help.
Yes, UTF-8 != Unicode.
UTF-8 is a specifc string encoding, as are ASCII and ISO 8859-1. Try this:
For any input string do a inputstring.decode('utf-8') (or whatever input encoding you get). For any output string do a outputstring.encode('utf-8')(or whatever output encoding you want). For any internal use, take unicode strings ('this is a normal string'.decode('utf-8') == u'this is a normal string')
'foo' is a string, u'foo' is a unicode string, which doesn't "have" an encoding (can't be decoded). SO anytime python want to change an encoding of a normal string, it first tries to "decode" it, the to "encode" it. And the default is "ascii", which fails more often than not :-)