How to fix: "UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte"

tl;dr / quick fix

Don't decode/encode willy nilly

Don't assume your strings are UTF-8 encoded

Try to convert strings to Unicode strings as soon as possible in your code

Fix your locale: How to solve UnicodeDecodeError in Python 3.6?

Don't be tempted to use quick reload hacks

Unicode Zen in Python 2.x - The Long Version

Without seeing the source it's difficult to know the root cause, so I'll have to speak generally.

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte generally happens when you try to convert a Python 2.x str that contains non-ASCII to a Unicode string without specifying the encoding of the original string.

In brief, Unicode strings are an entirely separate type of Python string that does not contain any encoding. They only hold Unicode point codes and therefore can hold any Unicode point from across the entire spectrum. Strings contain encoded text, beit UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8895-1, GBK, Big5 etc. Strings are decoded to Unicode and Unicodes are encoded to strings. Files and text data are always transferred in encoded strings.

The Markdown module authors probably use unicode() (where the exception is thrown) as a quality gate to the rest of the code - it will convert ASCII or re-wrap existing Unicodes strings to a new Unicode string. The Markdown authors can't know the encoding of the incoming string so will rely on you to decode strings to Unicode strings before passing to Markdown.

Unicode strings can be declared in your code using the u prefix to strings. E.g.

>>> my_u = u'my ünicôdé strįng'
>>> type(my_u)
<type 'unicode'>

Unicode strings may also come from file, databases and network modules. When this happens, you don't need to worry about the encoding.

Gotchas

Conversion from str to Unicode can happen even when you don't explicitly call unicode().

The following scenarios cause UnicodeDecodeError exceptions:

# Explicit conversion without encoding
unicode('€')

# New style format string into Unicode string
# Python will try to convert value string to Unicode first
u"The currency is: {}".format('€')

# Old style format string into Unicode string
# Python will try to convert value string to Unicode first
u'The currency is: %s' % '€'

# Append string to Unicode
# Python will try to convert string to Unicode first
u'The currency is: ' + '€'         

Examples

https://i.stack.imgur.com/uUUBd.jpg

In this diagram, decode() is called with ascii (which is the same as calling unicode() without an encoding given). As ASCII can't contain bytes greater than 0x7F, this will throw a UnicodeDecodeError exception:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/oyk7O.jpg

The Unicode Sandwich

It's good practice to form a Unicode sandwich in your code, where you decode all incoming data to Unicode strings, work with Unicodes, then encode to strs on the way out. This saves you from worrying about the encoding of strings in the middle of your code.

Input / Decode

Source code

If you need to bake non-ASCII into your source code, just create Unicode strings by prefixing the string with a u. E.g.

u'Zürich'

To allow Python to decode your source code, you will need to add an encoding header to match the actual encoding of your file. For example, if your file was encoded as 'UTF-8', you would use:

# encoding: utf-8

This is only necessary when you have non-ASCII in your source code.

Files

Usually non-ASCII data is received from a file. The io module provides a TextWrapper that decodes your file on the fly, using a given encoding. You must use the correct encoding for the file - it can't be easily guessed. For example, for a UTF-8 file:

import io
with io.open("my_utf8_file.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8") as my_file:
     my_unicode_string = my_file.read() 

my_unicode_string would then be suitable for passing to Markdown. If a UnicodeDecodeError from the read() line, then you've probably used the wrong encoding value.

CSV Files

The Python 2.7 CSV module does not support non-ASCII characters 😩. Help is at hand, however, with https://pypi.python.org/pypi/backports.csv.

Use it like above but pass the opened file to it:

from backports import csv
import io
with io.open("my_utf8_file.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8") as my_file:
    for row in csv.reader(my_file):
        yield row

Databases

Most Python database drivers can return data in Unicode, but usually require a little configuration. Always use Unicode strings for SQL queries.

In the connection string add:

charset='utf8',
use_unicode=True

E.g.

>>> db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost", user='root', passwd='passwd', db='sandbox', use_unicode=True, charset="utf8")

Add:

psycopg2.extensions.register_type(psycopg2.extensions.UNICODE)
psycopg2.extensions.register_type(psycopg2.extensions.UNICODEARRAY)

HTTP

Web pages can be encoded in just about any encoding. The Content-type header should contain a charset field to hint at the encoding. The content can then be decoded manually against this value. Alternatively, Python-Requests returns Unicodes in response.text.

Manually

If you must decode strings manually, you can simply do my_string.decode(encoding), where encoding is the appropriate encoding. Python 2.x supported codecs are given here: Standard Encodings. Again, if you get UnicodeDecodeError then you've probably got the wrong encoding.

The meat of the sandwich

Work with Unicodes as you would normal strs.

Output

stdout / printing

print writes through the stdout stream. Python tries to configure an encoder on stdout so that Unicodes are encoded to the console's encoding. For example, if a Linux shell's locale is en_GB.UTF-8, the output will be encoded to UTF-8. On Windows, you will be limited to an 8bit code page.

An incorrectly configured console, such as corrupt locale, can lead to unexpected print errors. PYTHONIOENCODING environment variable can force the encoding for stdout.

Files

Just like input, io.open can be used to transparently convert Unicodes to encoded byte strings.

Database

The same configuration for reading will allow Unicodes to be written directly.

Python 3

Python 3 is no more Unicode capable than Python 2.x is, however it is slightly less confused on the topic. E.g the regular str is now a Unicode string and the old str is now bytes.

The default encoding is UTF-8, so if you .decode() a byte string without giving an encoding, Python 3 uses UTF-8 encoding. This probably fixes 50% of people's Unicode problems.

Further, open() operates in text mode by default, so returns decoded str (Unicode ones). The encoding is derived from your locale, which tends to be UTF-8 on Un*x systems or an 8-bit code page, such as windows-1251, on Windows boxes.

Why you shouldn't use sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

It's a nasty hack (there's a reason you have to use reload) that will only mask problems and hinder your migration to Python 3.x. Understand the problem, fix the root cause and enjoy Unicode zen. See Why should we NOT use sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8") in a py script? for further details

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Finally I got it:

as3:/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages# cat sitecustomize.py
# encoding=utf8  
import sys  

reload(sys)  
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

Let me check:

as3:~/ngokevin-site# python
Python 2.7.6 (default, Dec  6 2013, 14:49:02)
[GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys
>>> reload(sys)
<module 'sys' (built-in)>
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'utf8'
>>>

The above shows the default encoding of python is utf8. Then the error is no more.

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This is the classic "unicode issue". I believe that explaining this is beyond the scope of a StackOverflow answer to completely explain what is happening.

It is well explained here.

In very brief summary, you have passed something that is being interpreted as a string of bytes to something that needs to decode it into Unicode characters, but the default codec (ascii) is failing.

The presentation I pointed you to provides advice for avoiding this. Make your code a "unicode sandwich". In Python 2, the use of from __future__ import unicode_literals helps.

Update: how can the code be fixed:

OK - in your variable "source" you have some bytes. It is not clear from your question how they got in there - maybe you read them from a web form? In any case, they are not encoded with ascii, but python is trying to convert them to unicode assuming that they are. You need to explicitly tell it what the encoding is. This means that you need to know what the encoding is! That is not always easy, and it depends entirely on where this string came from. You could experiment with some common encodings - for example UTF-8. You tell unicode() the encoding as a second parameter:

source = unicode(source, 'utf-8')

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In some cases, when you check your default encoding (print sys.getdefaultencoding()), it returns that you are using ASCII. If you change to UTF-8, it doesn't work, depending on the content of your variable. I found another way:

import sys
reload(sys)  
sys.setdefaultencoding('Cp1252')

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I was searching to solve the following error message:

unicodedecodeerror: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 5454: ordinal not in range(128)

I finally got it fixed by specifying 'encoding':

f = open('../glove/glove.6B.100d.txt', encoding="utf-8")

Wish it could help you too.

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"UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte"

Cause of this error: input_string must be unicode but str was given

"TypeError: Decoding Unicode is not supported"

Cause of this error: trying to convert unicode input_string into unicode

So first check that your input_string is str and convert to unicode if necessary:

if isinstance(input_string, str):
   input_string = unicode(input_string, 'utf-8')

Secondly, the above just changes the type but does not remove non ascii characters. If you want to remove non-ascii characters:

if isinstance(input_string, str):
   input_string = input_string.decode('ascii', 'ignore').encode('ascii') #note: this removes the character and encodes back to string.

elif isinstance(input_string, unicode):
   input_string = input_string.encode('ascii', 'ignore')

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In order to resolve this on an operating system level in an Ubuntu installation check the following:

$ locale charmap

If you get

locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory

instead of

UTF-8

then set LC_CTYPE and LC_ALL like this:

$ export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
$ export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"

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I find the best is to always convert to unicode - but this is difficult to achieve because in practice you'd have to check and convert every argument to every function and method you ever write that includes some form of string processing.

So I came up with the following approach to either guarantee unicodes or byte strings, from either input. In short, include and use the following lambdas:

# guarantee unicode string
_u = lambda t: t.decode('UTF-8', 'replace') if isinstance(t, str) else t
_uu = lambda *tt: tuple(_u(t) for t in tt) 
# guarantee byte string in UTF8 encoding
_u8 = lambda t: t.encode('UTF-8', 'replace') if isinstance(t, unicode) else t
_uu8 = lambda *tt: tuple(_u8(t) for t in tt)

Examples:

text='Some string with codes > 127, like Zürich'
utext=u'Some string with codes > 127, like Zürich'
print "==> with _u, _uu"
print _u(text), type(_u(text))
print _u(utext), type(_u(utext))
print _uu(text, utext), type(_uu(text, utext))
print "==> with u8, uu8"
print _u8(text), type(_u8(text))
print _u8(utext), type(_u8(utext))
print _uu8(text, utext), type(_uu8(text, utext))
# with % formatting, always use _u() and _uu()
print "Some unknown input %s" % _u(text)
print "Multiple inputs %s, %s" % _uu(text, text)
# but with string.format be sure to always work with unicode strings
print u"Also works with formats: {}".format(_u(text))
print u"Also works with formats: {},{}".format(*_uu(text, text))
# ... or use _u8 and _uu8, because string.format expects byte strings
print "Also works with formats: {}".format(_u8(text))
print "Also works with formats: {},{}".format(*_uu8(text, text))

Here's some more reasoning about this.

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Got a same error and this solved my error. Thanks! python 2 and python 3 differing in unicode handling is making pickled files quite incompatible to load. So Use python pickle's encoding argument. Link below helped me solve the similar problem when I was trying to open pickled data from my python 3.7, while my file was saved originally in python 2.x version. https://blog.modest-destiny.com/posts/python-2-and-3-compatible-pickle-save-and-load/ I copy the load_pickle function in my script and called the load_pickle(pickle_file) while loading my input_data like this:

input_data = load_pickle("my_dataset.pkl")

The load_pickle function is here:

def load_pickle(pickle_file):
    try:
        with open(pickle_file, 'rb') as f:
            pickle_data = pickle.load(f)
    except UnicodeDecodeError as e:
        with open(pickle_file, 'rb') as f:
            pickle_data = pickle.load(f, encoding='latin1')
    except Exception as e:
        print('Unable to load data ', pickle_file, ':', e)
        raise
    return pickle_data

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Encode converts a unicode object in to a string object. I think you are trying to encode a string object. first convert your result into unicode object and then encode that unicode object into 'utf-8'. for example

    result = yourFunction()
    result.decode().encode('utf-8')

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This worked for me:

    file = open('docs/my_messy_doc.pdf', 'rb')

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I had the same error, with URLs containing non-ascii chars (bytes with values > 128), my solution:

url = url.decode('utf8').encode('utf-8')

Note: utf-8, utf8 are simply aliases . Using only 'utf8' or 'utf-8' should work in the same way

In my case, worked for me, in Python 2.7, I suppose this assignment changed 'something' in the str internal representation--i.e., it forces the right decoding of the backed byte sequence in url and finally puts the string into a utf-8 str with all the magic in the right place. Unicode in Python is black magic for me. Hope useful

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I had the same problem but it didn't work for Python 3. I followed this and it solved my problem:

enc = sys.getdefaultencoding()
file = open(menu, "r", encoding = enc)

You have to set the encoding when you are reading/writing the file.

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I got the same problem with the string "PastelerÃa Mallorca" and I solved with:

unicode("Pastelería Mallorca", 'latin-1')

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In short, to ensure proper unicode handling in Python 2:

use io.open for reading/writing files

use from __future__ import unicode_literals

configure other data inputs/outputs (e.g., databases, network) to use unicode

if you cannot configure outputs to utf-8, convert your output for them print(text.encode('ascii', 'replace').decode())

For explanations, see @Alastair McCormack's detailed answer.

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In a Django (1.9.10)/Python 2.7.5 project I have frequent UnicodeDecodeError exceptions; mainly when I try to feed unicode strings to logging. I made a helper function for arbitrary objects to basically format to 8-bit ascii strings and replacing any characters not in the table to '?'. I think it's not the best solution but since the default encoding is ascii (and i don't want to change it) it will do:

def encode_for_logging(c, encoding='ascii'):
    if isinstance(c, basestring):
        return c.encode(encoding, 'replace')
    elif isinstance(c, Iterable):
        c_ = []
        for v in c:
            c_.append(encode_for_logging(v, encoding))
        return c_
    else:
        return encode_for_logging(unicode(c))

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This error occurs when there are some non ASCII characters in our string and we are performing any operations on that string without proper decoding. This helped me solve my problem. I am reading a CSV file with columns ID,Text and decoding characters in it as below:

train_df = pd.read_csv("Example.csv")
train_data = train_df.values
for i in train_data:
    print("ID :" + i[0])
    text = i[1].decode("utf-8",errors="ignore").strip().lower()
    print("Text: " + text)

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Here is my solution, just add the encoding. with open(file, encoding='utf8') as f

And because reading glove file will take a long time, I recommend to the glove file to a numpy file. When netx time you read the embedding weights, it will save your time.

import numpy as np
from tqdm import tqdm


def load_glove(file):
    """Loads GloVe vectors in numpy array.
    Args:
        file (str): a path to a glove file.
    Return:
        dict: a dict of numpy arrays.
    """
    embeddings_index = {}
    with open(file, encoding='utf8') as f:
        for i, line in tqdm(enumerate(f)):
            values = line.split()
            word = ''.join(values[:-300])
            coefs = np.asarray(values[-300:], dtype='float32')
            embeddings_index[word] = coefs

    return embeddings_index

# EMBEDDING_PATH = '../embedding_weights/glove.840B.300d.txt'
EMBEDDING_PATH = 'glove.840B.300d.txt'
embeddings = load_glove(EMBEDDING_PATH)

np.save('glove_embeddings.npy', embeddings) 

Gist link: https://gist.github.com/BrambleXu/634a844cdd3cd04bb2e3ba3c83aef227

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Specify: # encoding= utf-8 at the top of your Python File, It should fix the issue

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I experienced this error with Python2.7. It happened to me while trying to run many python programs, but I managed to reproduce it with this simple script:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import subprocess
import sys

result = subprocess.Popen([u'svn', u'info'])
if not callable(getattr(result, "__enter__", None)) and not callable(getattr(result, "__exit__", None)):
    print("foo")
print("bar")

On success, it should print out 'foo' and 'bar', and probably an error message if you're not in a svn folder.

On failure, it should print 'UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc4 in position 39: ordinal not in range(128)'.

After trying to regenerate my locales and many other solutions posted in this question, I learned the error was happening because I had a special character (ĺ) encoded in my PATH environment variable. After fixing the PATH in '~/.bashrc', and exiting my session and entering again, (apparently sourcing '~/.bashrc' didn't work), the issue was gone.

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