How to fix broken utf-8 encoding in Python?

Question

My string is Niệm Bồ Tát (Thiá»n sÆ° Nhất Hạnh) and I want to decode it to Niệm Bồ Tát (Thiền sư Nhất Hạnh). I see in that site can do that ht

Answer 1

Try:

str.encode('ascii', 'ignore').decode('utf-8')

You're encoding the string in ASCII format / ignoring the errors and decoding in UTF-8. This may remove the accents, but it's one approach.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what you can do with these kind of data, but for your example in your original post, this works:

>>> mystr = '09. Bát Nhã Tâm Kinh'
>>> s = mystr.decode('utf8').encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
>>> s
u'09. B\xe1t Nh\xe3 T\xe2m Kinh'
>>> print(s)
09. Bát Nhã Tâm Kinh

Answer 3

The only thing that helped me with broken cyrillic string - https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy

This module fixes pretty much everything and works much better than online decoders.

>>> from ftfy import fix_encoding
>>> mystr = '09. Bát Nhã Tâm Kinh'
>>> fix_encoding(mystr)
'09. Bát Nhã Tâm Kinh'

It can be easily installed using pip install ftfy