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

Question

as3:~/ngokevin-site# nano content/blog/20140114_test-chinese.mkd
as3:~/ngokevin-site# wok
Traceback (most recent call last):
File \"/usr/local/bin/wok\", line 4, in
         


        

Answer 1

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)