CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonunicodepython-2.x
semiflex
semiflex

Reputation: 1246

How do I turn a string into a unicode from a text file?

I have a text file with the following contents:

Guadalajara
Culiacán
Juárez
Ecatepec

I want to convert all of these to unicode. I tried using:

unicode(INSERT WORD FROM TEXT FILE)

But I get the error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe1 in position 6: ordinal not in range(128)

Is there anyway of converting a string from a text file to unicode?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 65

Answers (1)

Tim Pietzcker
Tim Pietzcker

Reputation: 336108

You need to know the file's encoding. If you do, open the file with codecs.open() and you'll automatically get proper Unicode objects:

import codecs
with codecs.open("myfile.txt", encoding="utf-8") as infile:
    text = infile.read()

You can also open the file "normally" and then manually decode its contents - you still need to know what the encoding is, though:

with open("myfile.txt") as infile:
    text = infile.read()
uni = text.decode("utf-8")

Upvotes: 1

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