“Unicode Error ”unicodeescape" codec can't decode bytes… Cannot open text files in Python 3 [duplicate]

Answer 1

With Python 3 I had this problem:

 self.path = 'T:\PythonScripts\Projects\Utilities'

produced this error:

 self.path = 'T:\PythonScripts\Projects\Utilities'
            ^
 SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in
 position 25-26: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

the fix that worked is:

 self.path = r'T:\PythonScripts\Projects\Utilities'

It seems the '\U' was producing an error and the 'r' preceding the string turns off the eight-character Unicode escape (for a raw string) which was failing. (This is a bit of an over-simplification, but it works if you don't care about unicode)

Hope this helps someone