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Python

Posted by Baptiste BOULONNAIS
Baptiste BOULONNAIS
9,845 Points

Unable to read file locally on Mac (Encoding error)

Hi,

I'm unable to read the names.txt file locally.

The error :

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xed' in position 865: ordinal not in range(128)

The code :

names_file = open("names.txt", encoding="utf-8")
data = names_file.read()
names_file.close()

print(data)

It did worked but only when I removed all the letters whith an accent and I wonder if there was a better solution. So far I tried to save the file with a different encoding and I did modify the encoding inside the script to utf-16, utf-32, latin1 but still no success.

The project is from this vidéo : https://teamtreehouse.com/library/regular-expressions-in-python/introduction-to-regular-expressions/reading-files I download the file from the project.

Any help would be great please.

Nathan Tallack
Nathan Tallack
22,164 Points
Nathan Tallack
Nathan Tallack
22,164 Points

How did you create your names.txt file? Did you cut and paste it into an editor? If so, which one? Did you download it? If so, can you provide the link?

1 Answer

Kunal Goswami
Kunal Goswami
1,820 Points

The encoding is "latin_1" and not latin1. And you could also just replace it with "iso-8859-1". See if that works?

Baptiste BOULONNAIS
Baptiste BOULONNAIS
9,845 Points

Thanks for the reply but I still got an error. I should have mention that I was trying with the build tool from sublime text. I just give it a try with Terminal and it worked fine with "utf-8" encoding.