CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonjsonpandasdictionaryyaml
renakre
renakre

Reputation: 8291

The unknown escape character issue when using YAML in python

I have the following text (one of the cells in pandas dataframe) that creates trouble when converting it to a json dictionary type:

 {"options_selected":{"Ideas":"0"},"criterion_feedback":{},
  "overall_feedback":"...and that\'s something I want to learn too. ",
  "submission_uuid":"b195603a-60f5-11e4-95a7-0a7da95da37f"}

The code I am using is this:

df['POST'] = df['POST'].apply(yaml.load)

It throws the following error:

found unknown escape character "'"
  in "<unicode string>", line 1, column 174:
     ... that\'s something I want to learn too ...

When I print that specific cell, this is what I got

df.ix[7, 'POST']

>> that\\\'s

I have checked already other relevant questions in SO and the YAML guide, but could not figure out what the solution is. Can someone help please?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 10900

Answers (1)

Kruup&#246;s
Kruup&#246;s

Reputation: 5474

You will have to remove the escaped character first because JSON doesn't allow it.

import json

j = '{"options_selected":{"Ideas":"0"},"criterion_feedback":{}, "overall_feedback":"...and that\'s something I want to learn too. ", "submission_uuid":"b195603a-60f5-11e4-95a7-0a7da95da37f"}'

json.loads(j.replace("\\'", "'"))

Edit:

as @larks said in the comment,

that ' doesn't need to be escaped (because the string is enclosed in double quotes)

and indeed your problem is hard to reproduce:

import yaml
import json

data = """
    options_selected: 
        Ideas: '0'
    criterion_feedback: {}
    overall_feedback": ...and that\'s something I want to learn too. ,
    submission_uuid : b195603a-60f5-11e4-95a7-0a7da95da37f
"""

print yaml.load(data)

j = '{"options_selected":{"Ideas":"0"},"criterion_feedback":{}, "overall_feedback":"...and that\'s something I want to learn too. ", "submission_uuid":"b195603a-60f5-11e4-95a7-0a7da95da37f"}'

print json.loads(j)

will both output:

{'overall_feedback"': "...and that's something I want to learn too. ,", 'submission_uuid': 'b195603a-60f5-11e4-95a7-0a7da95da37f', 'options_selected': {'Ideas': '0'}, 'criterion_feedback': {}}

Upvotes: 2

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