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Asked: 2026-06-02T14:30:51+00:00

I’m trying to read some files using Python3.2, the some of the files may

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I’m trying to read some files using Python3.2, the some of the files may contain unicode while others do not.

When I try:

file = open(item_path + item, encoding="utf-8")
for line in file:
    print (repr(line))

I get the error: 

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 13-16: ordinal not in range(128)

I am following the documentation here: http://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/howto/unicode.html

Why would Python be trying to encode to ascii at any point in this code?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    What’s your output encoding? If you remove the call to print(), does it start working?

    I suspect you’ve got a non-UTF-8 locale, so Python is trying to encode repr(line) as ASCII as part of printing it.

    To resolve the issue, you must either encode the string and print the byte array, or set your default encoding to something that can handle your strings (UTF-8 being the obvious choice).

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