Python: UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

I\'m currently have an issue with my python 3 code.

 replace_line(\'Products.txt\', line, tenminus_str)

Is the line I\'m trying to turn in

Answer 1

Try adding encoding='utf8' if you are reading a file

with open("../file_path", encoding='utf8'):
         # your code

Answer 2

Change your function to:

def replace_line(file_name, line_num, text):
    with open(file_name, 'r', encoding='utf8') as f:
        lines = f.readlines()
    lines[line_num] = text
    with open(file_name, 'w', encoding='utf8') as out:
        out.writelines(lines)

encoding='utf8' will decode your UTF-8 file correctly.

with automatically closes the file when its block is exited.

Since your file started with \xef it likely has a UTF-8-encoding byte order mark (BOM) character at the beginning. The above code will maintain that on output, but if you don't want it use utf-8-sig for the input encoding. Then it will be automatically removed.

Answer 3

Handling coding problems You can try adding the following settings to your head

---

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')
Type = sys.getfilesystemencoding()

Answer 4

codecs module is just what you need. detail here

import codecs
def replace_line(file_name, line_num, text):
    f = codecs.open(file_name, 'r', encoding='utf-8')
    lines = f.readlines()
    lines[line_num] = text
    f.close()
    w = codecs.open(file_name, 'w', encoding='utf-8')
    w.writelines(lines)
    w.close()