Question

    with open(path) as f:
        for line in f:
            print line

path is file with single line as \xc2

when I run this I get

\xc2

now lets change this

with open(path) as f:
    for line in f:
                var = '\xc2'
                print var

When I run this, I see

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii', '\xc2d', 0, 1, 'ordinal not in range(128)'

then I try to compare the so I do

with open(path) as f:
    for line in f:
        line = line.strip()
        line1 = '\xc2d'
        # print line1
        print line == line1

and I see False

What is happening here??

Answer 1

When you read characters from a file, \ is just another character and has no special meaning. When you try to create a string from it though, it’s used as an escape that has special meanings depending on what follows. For example \x means take the next 2 hex digits and create the character that corresponds to the hex code, thus '\xc2' is a single character. Since this character code isn’t in the ASCII range of 0 to 127 (0x7f), you get an error when you try to print it.