Unicode error handling with Python 3's readlines()
encoding, python, python-3.x, text
Solution
In Python 3, pass an appropriate `errors=` value (such as `errors=ignore` or `errors=replace`) on creating your file object (presuming it to be a subclass of `io.TextIOWrapper` -- and if it isn't, consider wrapping it in one!); also, consider passing a more likely encoding than `charmap` (when you aren't sure, `utf-8` is always a good place to start).
For instance:
f = open('misc-notes.txt', encoding='utf-8', errors='ignore')
In Python 2, the `read()` operation simply returns bytes; the trick, then, is decoding them to get them into a string (if you do, in fact, want characters as opposed to bytes). If you don't have a better guess for their real encoding:
your_string.decode('utf-8', 'replace')
...to replace unhandled characters, or
your_string.decode('utf-8', 'ignore')
to simply ignore them.
That said, finding and using their real encoding (rather than guessing `utf-8`) would be preferred.
Problem
I keep getting this error while reading a text file. Is it possible to handle/ignore it and proceed? UnicodeEncodeError: ‘charmap’ codec can’t decode byte 0x81 in position 7827: character maps to undefined.