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Having trouble reading and writing Hindi Devanagari characters in text files using Python.

  1. Reading:
    Python is unable to read Devanagari characters in my text file when following code is implemented.

    Code:

         f=open(r"C:\Users\Dell\Desktop\abc1.txt","w")
     print(f.read())
     f.close()

    O/P: म (instead of म)

    While the same code produces correct output for '&' symbols in my file as follows

    O/P: &

  2. Writing:
    Following implementation throws an error message.
    Unicode for म being 092e
    Code:

      f=open(r"C:\Users\Dell\Desktop\abc1.txt","w")
  f.write(u"\u092e")
  f.close()

    Error Message:

     Exception has occurred: UnicodeEncodeError
 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u092e' in position 0: character maps to <undefined>
   File "C:\Users\Dell\Desktop\Python\gg.py", line 2, in <module>
     f.write(u"\u092e")

While the character writes successfully on standard output as follows:

Code:

print(u"\u092e")

O/P: म

Kindly explain why so? How can I read and write Devanagari characters on text file? Any alternatives?

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James Z
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AT3140
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  • The encoding used to open a text file is OS-dependent. specify the *actual* encoding of the file. `encoding='utf8'` is a good choice, but existing files could be in another encoding. – Mark Tolonen Mar 17 '22 at 01:58

1 Answers1

1

Have you tried opening the file with UTF8 or UTF16? It depends on how your source file is saved (which encoding is used).

For example, try:

with open(r'C:\Users\Dell\Desktop\abc1.txt','r', encoding='utf-16') as f:
    print(f.read())
DocZerø
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