“Unicode Error “unicodeescape” codec can’t decode bytes… Cannot open text files in Python 3

Posted By: Anonymous

I am using Python 3.1 on a Windows 7 machine. Russian is the default system language, and utf-8 is the default encoding.

Looking at the answer to a previous question, I have attempting using the "codecs" module to give me a little luck. Here’s a few examples:

>>> g = codecs.open("C:UsersEricDesktopbeeline.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-4: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape (<pyshell#39>, line 1)

>>> g = codecs.open("C:UsersEricDesktopSite.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-4: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape (<pyshell#40>, line 1)

>>> g = codecs.open("C:Python31Notes.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 11-12: malformed N character escape (<pyshell#41>, line 1)

>>> g = codecs.open("C:UsersEricDesktopSite.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-4: truncated UXXXXXXXX escape (<pyshell#44>, line 1)

My last idea was, I thought it might have been the fact that Windows "translates" a few folders, such as the "users" folder, into Russian (though typing "users" is still the correct path), so I tried it in the Python31 folder. Still, no luck. Any ideas?

Solution

The problem is with the string

"C:UsersEricDesktopbeeline.txt"

Here, U in "C:Users… starts an eight-character Unicode escape, such as U00014321. In your code, the escape is followed by the character ‘s’, which is invalid.

You either need to duplicate all backslashes:

"C:\Users\Eric\Desktop\beeline.txt"

Or prefix the string with r (to produce a raw string):

r"C:UsersEricDesktopbeeline.txt"

Answered By: Anonymous

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