Home/ Questions/Q 6079251
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-23T10:55:32+00:00

I needed to start dealing with foreign characters, and in doing so, I think

  • 0

I needed to start dealing with foreign characters, and in doing so, I think I royally screwed up a file’s encoding.

The error I’m getting is:

Lexical error at line 1, column 8.  Encountered: "" (0), after :  ""

The first line of the file is:

import xml.etree.cElementTree as ET

Also of note: when I pasted the line above into the textarea to ask this question, and submitted, an unknown character appeared between every character (e
I have been unable to fix this issue by adding an explicit coding definition:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

I have also been unable to revert the file (using Hg) to a previous version, nor copy/paste code into a new file, or replace the broken file with copied/pasted code.

Please help!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If it is indeed a zero character in there, you may find you’ve injected some UTF-16/UCS-2 text. That particular Unicode encoding would have a zero byte in between every ASCII character.

    The best way to find out is to do a hex dump of you file with something like od -xcb myfile.py.

    If that is the case, then you’ll need to edit the file with something that’s able to see those characters, and fix them up.

    vi would be my first choice (since that’s what I’m used to) but I don’t want to start any holy wars with the Emacs illuminati. In vi, they’ll most likely show up as ^@ characters.

    • 0