Question

I’m using the following regular expression basically to search for and delete these characters.

invalid_unicode = re.compile(ur'(Û|²|°|±|É|¹|Í)')

My source code in ASCII encoded, and whenever I try to run the script it spits out:

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character ‘\xdb’ in file ./release.py on line 273, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details

If I follow the instructions at the given website, and place utf-8 on the second line encoding, my script doesn’t run. Instead it gives me this error:

SyntaxError: (unicode error) ‘utf8’ codec can’t decode byte 0xdb in position 0: unexpected end of data

How do I get this one regular expression running in an ASCII written script that’d be great.

Answer 1

You need to find out what encoding your editor is using, and set that per PEP263; or, make things more stable and portable (though alas perhaps a bit less readable) and use escape sequences in your string literal, i.e., use u'(\xdb|\xb2|\xb0|\xb1|\xc9|\xb9|\xcd)' as the parameter to the re.compile call.