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Python Regular Expressions in Python Introduction to Regular Expressions Reading Files

Babak Damadi
PLUS
Babak Damadi
Courses Plus Student 3,133 Points
Posted by Babak Damadi
Babak Damadi
Courses Plus Student 3,133 Points

with Open("names.txt")

Not sure about this error while replacing the code with the

import re with open("names.txt") as open_file: data = open_file.read() last_name = r'Love' first_name = r'Kenneth' print(re.match(last_name, data)) # bigining of string print(re.search(first_name, data)) # somewhere in the string

File "address_book.py", line 4, in <module>
data = open_file.read()
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 217: ordinal not in range(128)

2 Answers

Kenneth Love
STAFF
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Kenneth Love
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Doing this on your computer instead of in Workspaces?

Some terminals aren't set up to display unicode characters (boo). What system are you on and, if you're on Mac or Linux, what shell (Bash, ZSH, etc) are you using?

Iain Simmons
MOD
Iain Simmons
Treehouse Moderator 32,305 Points
Iain Simmons
Iain Simmons
Treehouse Moderator 32,305 Points

The discussion on the following question on Stack Overflow presents two options: Why we need sys.setdefaultencoding(“utf-8”) in a py script?

  1. Add the following to the top of each script that uses Unicode (though apparently this practice is discouraged):

    import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

  2. If running Mac OS X or Linux, enter the following in the command line before running your script:

    export PYTHONIOENCODING=UTF-8

I didn't get those errors so I haven't been able to confirm either of these for this course...