I’m having a few issues trying to encode a string to UTF-8. I’ve tried numerous things, including using string.encode('utf-8') and unicode(string), but I get the error:

UnicodeDecodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xef in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

This is my string:

(｡･ω･｡)ﾉ

I don’t see what’s going wrong, any idea?

Edit: The problem is that printing the string as it is does not show properly. Also, this error when I try to convert it:

Python 2.7.1+ (r271:86832, Apr 11 2011, 18:13:53)
[GCC 4.5.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> s = '(\xef\xbd\xa1\xef\xbd\xa5\xcf\x89\xef\xbd\xa5\xef\xbd\xa1)\xef\xbe\x89'
>>> s1 = s.decode('utf-8')
>>> print s1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 1-5: ordinal not in range(128)

This is to do with the encoding of your terminal not being set to UTF-8. Here is my terminal

$ echo $LANG
en_GB.UTF-8
$ python
Python 2.7.3 (default, Apr 20 2012, 22:39:59) 
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> s = '(\xef\xbd\xa1\xef\xbd\xa5\xcf\x89\xef\xbd\xa5\xef\xbd\xa1)\xef\xbe\x89'
>>> s1 = s.decode('utf-8')
>>> print s1
(｡･ω･｡)ﾉ
>>> 

On my terminal the example works with the above, but if I get rid of the LANG setting then it won’t work

$ unset LANG
$ python
Python 2.7.3 (default, Apr 20 2012, 22:39:59) 
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> s = '(\xef\xbd\xa1\xef\xbd\xa5\xcf\x89\xef\xbd\xa5\xef\xbd\xa1)\xef\xbe\x89'
>>> s1 = s.decode('utf-8')
>>> print s1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 1-5: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> 

Consult the docs for your linux variant to discover how to make this change permanent.

try:

string.decode('utf-8')  # or:
unicode(string, 'utf-8')

edit:

'(\xef\xbd\xa1\xef\xbd\xa5\xcf\x89\xef\xbd\xa5\xef\xbd\xa1)\xef\xbe\x89'.decode('utf-8') gives u'(\uff61\uff65\u03c9\uff65\uff61)\uff89', which is correct.

so your problem must be at some oter place, possibly if you try to do something with it were there is an implicit conversion going on (could be printing, writing to a stream…)

to say more we’ll need to see some code.

My +1 to mata’s comment at https://stackoverflow.com/a/10561979/1346705 and to the Nick Craig-Wood’s demonstration. You have decoded the string correctly. The problem is with the print command as it converts the Unicode string to the console encoding, and the console is not capable to display the string. Try to write the string into a file and look at the result using some decent editor that supports Unicode:

import codecs

s = '(\xef\xbd\xa1\xef\xbd\xa5\xcf\x89\xef\xbd\xa5\xef\xbd\xa1)\xef\xbe\x89'
s1 = s.decode('utf-8')
f = codecs.open('out.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8')
f.write(s1)
f.close()

Then you will see (｡･ω･｡)ﾉ.

If you are working on a remote host, look at /etc/ssh/ssh_config on your local PC.

When this file contains a line:

SendEnv LANG LC_*

comment it out with adding # at the head of line. It might help.

With this line, ssh sends language related environment variables of your PC to the remote host. It causes a lot of problems.

Try setting the system default encoding as utf-8 at the start of the script, so that all strings are encoded using that.

# coding: utf-8
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

It’s fine to use the below code in the top of your script as Andrei Krasutski suggested.

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

But I will suggest you to also add # -*- coding: utf-8 -* line at very top of the script.

Omitting it throws below error in my case when I try to execute basic.py.

$ python basic.py
  File "01_basic.py", line 14
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xd9' in file basic.py on line 14, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details

The following is the code present in basic.py which throws above error.

code with error

from pylatex import Document, Section, Subsection, Command, Package
from pylatex.utils import italic, NoEscape

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

def fill_document(doc):
    with doc.create(Section('ِش سثؤفهخى')):
        doc.append('إخع ساخعمي شمصشغس سحثشن فاث فقعفا')
        doc.append(italic('فشمهؤ ؤخىفثىفس شقث شمسخ ىهؤث'))

        with doc.create(Subsection('آثص ٍعلاسثؤفهخى')):
            doc.append('بشةخعس ؤقشئغ ؤاشقشؤفثقس: $&#{}')


if __name__ == '__main__':
    # Basic document
    doc = Document('basic')
    fill_document(doc)

Then I added # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- line at very top and executed. It worked.

code without error

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from pylatex import Document, Section, Subsection, Command, Package
from pylatex.utils import italic, NoEscape

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

def fill_document(doc):
    with doc.create(Section('ِش سثؤفهخى')):
        doc.append('إخع ساخعمي شمصشغس سحثشن فاث فقعفا')
        doc.append(italic('فشمهؤ ؤخىفثىفس شقث شمسخ ىهؤث'))

        with doc.create(Subsection('آثص ٍعلاسثؤفهخى')):
            doc.append('بشةخعس ؤقشئغ ؤاشقشؤفثقس: $&#{}')


if __name__ == '__main__':
    # Basic document
    doc = Document('basic')
    fill_document(doc)

Thanks.

No problems with my terminal. The above answers helped me looking in the right directions but it didn’t work for me until I added 'ignore':

fix_encoding = lambda s: s.decode('utf8', 'ignore')

As indicated in the comment below, this may lead to undesired results. OTOH it also may just do the trick well enough to get things working and you don’t care about losing some characters.

this works for ubuntu 15.10:

sudo locale-gen "en_US.UTF-8"
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

It looks like your string is encoded to utf-8, so what exactly is the problem? Or what are you trying to do here..?

Python 2.7.3 (default, Apr 20 2012, 22:39:59) 
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> s = '(\xef\xbd\xa1\xef\xbd\xa5\xcf\x89\xef\xbd\xa5\xef\xbd\xa1)\xef\xbe\x89'
>>> s1 = s.decode('utf-8')
>>> print s1
(｡･ω･｡)ﾉ
>>> s2 = u'(｡･ω･｡)ﾉ'
>>> s2 == s1
True
>>> s2
u'(\uff61\uff65\u03c9\uff65\uff61)\uff89'

In my case, it was caused by my Unicode file being saved with a “BOM”. To solve this, I cracked open the file using BBEdit and did a “Save as…” choosing for encoding “Unicode (UTF-8)” and not what it came with which was “Unicode (UTF-8, with BOM)”

I was getting the same type of error, and I found that the console is not capable of displaying the string in another language. Hence I made the below code changes to set default_charset as UTF-8.

data_head = [('\x81\xa1\x8fo\x89\xef\x82\xa2\x95\xdb\x8f\xd8\x90\xa7\x93x\x81\xcb3\x8c\x8e\x8cp\x91\xb1\x92\x86(\x81\x86\x81\xde\x81\x85)\x81\xa1\x8f\x89\x89\xf1\x88\xc8\x8aO\x81A\x82\xa8\x8b\xe0\x82\xcc\x90S\x94z\x82\xcd\x88\xea\x90\xd8\x95s\x97v\x81\xa1\x83}\x83b\x83v\x82\xcc\x82\xa8\x8e\x8e\x82\xb5\x95\xdb\x8c\xaf\x82\xc5\x8fo\x89\xef\x82\xa2\x8am\x92\xe8\x81\xa1', 'shift_jis')]
default_charset = 'UTF-8' #can also try 'ascii' or other unicode type
print ''.join([ unicode(lin[0], lin[1] or default_charset) for lin in data_head ])

This is the best answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4027726/2159089

in linux:

export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8

so sys.stdout.encoding is OK.

BOM, it’s so often BOM for me

vi the file, use

:set nobomb

and save it. That nearly always fixes it in my case

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

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

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

i solve that problem changing in the file settings.py with ‘ENGINE’: ‘django.db.backends.mysql’, don´t use ‘ENGINE’: ‘mysql.connector.django’,

Just convert the text explicitly to string using str(). Worked for me.

I get an error with the following patter:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ufeff' in position 155: ordinal not in range(128)

Not sure what u'\ufeff' is, it shows up when I’m web scraping. How can I remedy the situation? The .replace() string method doesn’t work on it.

The Unicode character U+FEFF is the byte order mark, or BOM, and is used to tell the difference between big- and little-endian UTF-16 encoding. If you decode the web page using the right codec, Python will remove it for you. Examples:

#!python2
#coding: utf8
u = u'ABC'
e8 = u.encode('utf-8')        # encode without BOM
e8s = u.encode('utf-8-sig')   # encode with BOM
e16 = u.encode('utf-16')      # encode with BOM
e16le = u.encode('utf-16le')  # encode without BOM
e16be = u.encode('utf-16be')  # encode without BOM
print 'utf-8     %r' % e8
print 'utf-8-sig %r' % e8s
print 'utf-16    %r' % e16
print 'utf-16le  %r' % e16le
print 'utf-16be  %r' % e16be
print
print 'utf-8  w/ BOM decoded with utf-8     %r' % e8s.decode('utf-8')
print 'utf-8  w/ BOM decoded with utf-8-sig %r' % e8s.decode('utf-8-sig')
print 'utf-16 w/ BOM decoded with utf-16    %r' % e16.decode('utf-16')
print 'utf-16 w/ BOM decoded with utf-16le  %r' % e16.decode('utf-16le')

Note that EF BB BF is a UTF-8-encoded BOM. It is not required for UTF-8, but serves only as a signature (usually on Windows).

Output:

utf-8     'ABC'
utf-8-sig '\xef\xbb\xbfABC'
utf-16    '\xff\xfeA\x00B\x00C\x00'    # Adds BOM and encodes using native processor endian-ness.
utf-16le  'A\x00B\x00C\x00'
utf-16be  '\x00A\x00B\x00C'

utf-8  w/ BOM decoded with utf-8     u'\ufeffABC'    # doesn't remove BOM if present.
utf-8  w/ BOM decoded with utf-8-sig u'ABC'          # removes BOM if present.
utf-16 w/ BOM decoded with utf-16    u'ABC'          # *requires* BOM to be present.
utf-16 w/ BOM decoded with utf-16le  u'\ufeffABC'    # doesn't remove BOM if present.

Note that the utf-16 codec requires BOM to be present, or Python won’t know if the data is big- or little-endian.

I ran into this on Python 3 and found this question (and solution). When opening a file, Python 3 supports the encoding keyword to automatically handle the encoding.

Without it, the BOM is included in the read result:

>>> f = open('file', mode='r')
>>> f.read()
'\ufefftest'

Giving the correct encoding, the BOM is omitted in the result:

>>> f = open('file', mode='r', encoding='utf-8-sig')
>>> f.read()
'test'

Just my 2 cents.

That character is the BOM or “Byte Order Mark”. It is usually received as the first few bytes of a file, telling you how to interpret the encoding of the rest of the data. You can simply remove the character to continue. Although, since the error says you were trying to convert to ‘ascii’, you should probably pick another encoding for whatever you were trying to do.

The content you’re scraping is encoded in unicode rather than ascii text, and you’re getting a character that doesn’t convert to ascii. The right ‘translation’ depends on what the original web page thought it was. Python’s unicode page gives the background on how it works.

Are you trying to print the result or stick it in a file? The error suggests it’s writing the data that’s causing the problem, not reading it. This question is a good place to look for the fixes.

Here is based on the answer from Mark Tolonen. The string included different languages of the word ‘test’ that’s separated by ‘|’, so you can see the difference.

u = u'ABCtestβ貝塔위másbêta|test|اختبار|测试|測試|テスト|परीक्षा|പരിശോധന|פּרובירן|kiểm tra|Ölçek|'
e8 = u.encode('utf-8')        # encode without BOM
e8s = u.encode('utf-8-sig')   # encode with BOM
e16 = u.encode('utf-16')      # encode with BOM
e16le = u.encode('utf-16le')  # encode without BOM
e16be = u.encode('utf-16be')  # encode without BOM
print('utf-8     %r' % e8)
print('utf-8-sig %r' % e8s)
print('utf-16    %r' % e16)
print('utf-16le  %r' % e16le)
print('utf-16be  %r' % e16be)
print()
print('utf-8  w/ BOM decoded with utf-8     %r' % e8s.decode('utf-8'))
print('utf-8  w/ BOM decoded with utf-8-sig %r' % e8s.decode('utf-8-sig'))
print('utf-16 w/ BOM decoded with utf-16    %r' % e16.decode('utf-16'))
print('utf-16 w/ BOM decoded with utf-16le  %r' % e16.decode('utf-16le'))

Here is a test run:

>>> u = u'ABCtestβ貝塔위másbêta|test|اختبار|测试|測試|テスト|परीक्षा|പരിശോധന|פּרובירן|kiểm tra|Ölçek|'
>>> e8 = u.encode('utf-8')        # encode without BOM
>>> e8s = u.encode('utf-8-sig')   # encode with BOM
>>> e16 = u.encode('utf-16')      # encode with BOM
>>> e16le = u.encode('utf-16le')  # encode without BOM
>>> e16be = u.encode('utf-16be')  # encode without BOM
>>> print('utf-8     %r' % e8)
utf-8     b'ABCtest\xce\xb2\xe8\xb2\x9d\xe5\xa1\x94\xec\x9c\x84m\xc3\xa1sb\xc3\xaata|test|\xd8\xa7\xd8\xae\xd8\xaa\xd8\xa8\xd8\xa7\xd8\xb1|\xe6\xb5\x8b\xe8\xaf\x95|\xe6\xb8\xac\xe8\xa9\xa6|\xe3\x83\x86\xe3\x82\xb9\xe3\x83\x88|\xe0\xa4\xaa\xe0\xa4\xb0\xe0\xa5\x80\xe0\xa4\x95\xe0\xa5\x8d\xe0\xa4\xb7\xe0\xa4\xbe|\xe0\xb4\xaa\xe0\xb4\xb0\xe0\xb4\xbf\xe0\xb4\xb6\xe0\xb5\x8b\xe0\xb4\xa7\xe0\xb4\xa8|\xd7\xa4\xd6\xbc\xd7\xa8\xd7\x95\xd7\x91\xd7\x99\xd7\xa8\xd7\x9f|ki\xe1\xbb\x83m tra|\xc3\x96l\xc3\xa7ek|'
>>> print('utf-8-sig %r' % e8s)
utf-8-sig b'\xef\xbb\xbfABCtest\xce\xb2\xe8\xb2\x9d\xe5\xa1\x94\xec\x9c\x84m\xc3\xa1sb\xc3\xaata|test|\xd8\xa7\xd8\xae\xd8\xaa\xd8\xa8\xd8\xa7\xd8\xb1|\xe6\xb5\x8b\xe8\xaf\x95|\xe6\xb8\xac\xe8\xa9\xa6|\xe3\x83\x86\xe3\x82\xb9\xe3\x83\x88|\xe0\xa4\xaa\xe0\xa4\xb0\xe0\xa5\x80\xe0\xa4\x95\xe0\xa5\x8d\xe0\xa4\xb7\xe0\xa4\xbe|\xe0\xb4\xaa\xe0\xb4\xb0\xe0\xb4\xbf\xe0\xb4\xb6\xe0\xb5\x8b\xe0\xb4\xa7\xe0\xb4\xa8|\xd7\xa4\xd6\xbc\xd7\xa8\xd7\x95\xd7\x91\xd7\x99\xd7\xa8\xd7\x9f|ki\xe1\xbb\x83m tra|\xc3\x96l\xc3\xa7ek|'
>>> print('utf-16    %r' % e16)
utf-16    b"\xff\xfeA\x00B\x00C\x00t\x00e\x00s\x00t\x00\xb2\x03\x9d\x8cTX\x04\xc7m\x00\xe1\x00s\x00b\x00\xea\x00t\x00a\x00|\x00t\x00e\x00s\x00t\x00|\x00'\x06.\x06*\x06(\x06'\x061\x06|\x00Km\xd5\x8b|\x00,nf\x8a|\x00\xc60\xb90\xc80|\x00*\t0\t@\t\x15\tM\t7\t>\t|\x00*\r0\r?\r6\rK\r'\r(\r|\x00\xe4\x05\xbc\x05\xe8\x05\xd5\x05\xd1\x05\xd9\x05\xe8\x05\xdf\x05|\x00k\x00i\x00\xc3\x1em\x00 \x00t\x00r\x00a\x00|\x00\xd6\x00l\x00\xe7\x00e\x00k\x00|\x00"
>>> print('utf-16le  %r' % e16le)
utf-16le  b"A\x00B\x00C\x00t\x00e\x00s\x00t\x00\xb2\x03\x9d\x8cTX\x04\xc7m\x00\xe1\x00s\x00b\x00\xea\x00t\x00a\x00|\x00t\x00e\x00s\x00t\x00|\x00'\x06.\x06*\x06(\x06'\x061\x06|\x00Km\xd5\x8b|\x00,nf\x8a|\x00\xc60\xb90\xc80|\x00*\t0\t@\t\x15\tM\t7\t>\t|\x00*\r0\r?\r6\rK\r'\r(\r|\x00\xe4\x05\xbc\x05\xe8\x05\xd5\x05\xd1\x05\xd9\x05\xe8\x05\xdf\x05|\x00k\x00i\x00\xc3\x1em\x00 \x00t\x00r\x00a\x00|\x00\xd6\x00l\x00\xe7\x00e\x00k\x00|\x00"
>>> print('utf-16be  %r' % e16be)
utf-16be  b"\x00A\x00B\x00C\x00t\x00e\x00s\x00t\x03\xb2\x8c\x9dXT\xc7\x04\x00m\x00\xe1\x00s\x00b\x00\xea\x00t\x00a\x00|\x00t\x00e\x00s\x00t\x00|\x06'\x06.\x06*\x06(\x06'\x061\x00|mK\x8b\xd5\x00|n,\x8af\x00|0\xc60\xb90\xc8\x00|\t*\t0\t@\t\x15\tM\t7\t>\x00|\r*\r0\r?\r6\rK\r'\r(\x00|\x05\xe4\x05\xbc\x05\xe8\x05\xd5\x05\xd1\x05\xd9\x05\xe8\x05\xdf\x00|\x00k\x00i\x1e\xc3\x00m\x00 \x00t\x00r\x00a\x00|\x00\xd6\x00l\x00\xe7\x00e\x00k\x00|"
>>> print()

>>> print('utf-8  w/ BOM decoded with utf-8     %r' % e8s.decode('utf-8'))
utf-8  w/ BOM decoded with utf-8     '\ufeffABCtestβ貝塔위másbêta|test|اختبار|测试|測試|テスト|परीक्षा|പരിശോധന|פּרובירן|kiểm tra|Ölçek|'
>>> print('utf-8  w/ BOM decoded with utf-8-sig %r' % e8s.decode('utf-8-sig'))
utf-8  w/ BOM decoded with utf-8-sig 'ABCtestβ貝塔위másbêta|test|اختبار|测试|測試|テスト|परीक्षा|പരിശോധന|פּרובירן|kiểm tra|Ölçek|'
>>> print('utf-16 w/ BOM decoded with utf-16    %r' % e16.decode('utf-16'))
utf-16 w/ BOM decoded with utf-16    'ABCtestβ貝塔위másbêta|test|اختبار|测试|測試|テスト|परीक्षा|പരിശോധന|פּרובירן|kiểm tra|Ölçek|'
>>> print('utf-16 w/ BOM decoded with utf-16le  %r' % e16.decode('utf-16le'))
utf-16 w/ BOM decoded with utf-16le  '\ufeffABCtestβ貝塔위másbêta|test|اختبار|测试|測試|テスト|परीक्षा|പരിശോധന|פּרובירן|kiểm tra|Ölçek|'

It’s worth to know that only both utf-8-sig and utf-16 get back the original string after both encode and decode.

This problem arise basically when you save your python code in a UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding because python add some special character at the beginning of the code automatically (which is not shown by the text editors) to identify the encoding format. But, when you try to execute the code it gives you the syntax error in line 1 i.e, start of code because python compiler understands ASCII encoding. when you view the code of file using read() function you can see at the begin of the returned code ‘\ufeff’ is shown. The one simplest solution to this problem is just by changing the encoding back to ASCII encoding(for this you can copy your code to a notepad and save it Remember! choose the ASCII encoding… Hope this will help.