Reading files in Python 3.5 which have been generated in Python 2.7

Question

I have run some scritp in Python 2.7 which generated a file, and when I tried to open it I found the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc0 in position 2623: ordinal not in range(128)

Any clue on how to open it in Python 3.5?

Use the correct encoding when opening the file. UTF8 is a good first guess. — juanpa.arrivillaga, Apr 04 '19 at 18:05
It would help if you posted the code you are using to generate that error here for us to see exactly what is going wrong. — Hoog, Apr 04 '19 at 18:13

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 04 '19 at 18:08

1

Your file is in utf-8 (probably). The ASCII codec can't decode unicode text.

You should use the proper codec. The file.read() function returns a bytes-like object. You can turn that into a string like so:

contents = str(file.read(), 'utf-8')

answered Apr 04 '19 at 18:08

rdas

or you could specify the encoding when opening the file – Ralf Apr 04 '19 at 18:09

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 04 '19 at 18:11

1

You can specify the encoding when opening the file:

 with open(myfile, encoding='utf-8) as f:
     pass

answered Apr 04 '19 at 18:11

Jacques Gaudin

2 Answers2