Python SyntaxError Non-ASCII character xe2 in file

Question

I am writing some python code and I am receiving the error message as in the title  from searching this has to do with the character set    Here is the line that causes the error  hc   HealthCheck  instance health   interval 15  target808  HTTP 8080 index html     I cannot figure out what character is not in the ANSI ASCII set  Furthermore searching   xe2  does not give anymore information as to what character that appears as  Which character in that line is causing the issue    I have also seen a few fixes for this issue but I am not sure which to use  Could someone clarify what the issue is  python doesn t interpret unicode unless told to do so    and how I would clear it up properly   EDIT  Here are all the lines near the one that errors  def createLoadBalancer        conn   ELBConnection creds awsAccessKey  creds awsSecretKey      hc   HealthCheck  instance health   interval 15  target808  HTTP 8080 index html       lb   conn create load balancer  my lb     us-east-1a    us-east-1b     80  8080   http     443  8443   tcp         lb configure health check hc      return lb

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If it helps anybody  for me that happened because I was trying to run a Django implementation in python 3 4 with my python 2 7 command

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Or you could just simply use     coding  utf-8   at top of  py file

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I am trying to parse that weird windows apostraphe and after trying several things here is the code snippet that works   def convert freaking apostrophe self string       try        issuer rename   string decode  windows-1252      except        issuer rename   string decode  latin-1      issuer rename   issuer rename replace u       u        issuer rename   issuer rename encode  ascii   ignore      try        os rename directory     issuer directory     issuer rename        print  Successfully renamed   issuer   to   issuer rename       return issuer rename    except        pass   HANDLING FOR FUNKY APOSTRAPHE if re search r    x90- xff     issuer      issuer   self convert freaking apostrophe issuer

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I was unable to find what s the issue for long but later I realised that I had copied a line  UTC-12 00  from web and the hyphen dash in this was causing the problem  I just wrote this  -  again and the problem got resolved    So  sometimes the copy pasted lines also give errors  In such cases  just re-write the copy pasted code and it works  On re-writing  it would look like nothing got changed but the error will be gone

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for me  the problem was caused by typing my code into Mac Notes and then copied it from Mac Notes and pasted into my vim session to create my file  This made my single quotes the curved type  to fix it I opened my file in vim and replaced all my curved single quotes with the straight kind  just by removing and retyping the same character  It was Mac Notes that made the same key stroke produce the curved single quote

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Change the file character encoding   put below line to top of your code always    - - coding  utf-8 - -

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I had the same error while copying and pasting a comment from the web  For me it was a single quote     in the word   I just erased it and re-typed it

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I got this error for characters in my comments  from copying pasting content from the web into my editor for note-taking purposes     To resolve in Text Wrangler     Highlight the text Go the the Text menu Select  Convert to ASCII

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Adding   coding utf-8 line in first line of your  py file will fix the problem    Please read more about the problem and its fix on below link  in this article problem and its solution is beautifully described   https   www python org dev peps pep-0263

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I had this exact issue running the simple  py code below   import sys print  version is    sys version   DSM s code above provided the following   1  print  xe2 x80 x98version is xe2 x80 x99  sys version   So the issue was that my text editor used SMART QUOTES  as John Y suggested  After changing the text editor settings and re-opening saving the file  it works just fine

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I my case  xe2 was  a     which should be replaced by    In general I recommend to convert UTF-8 to ASCII using e g  https   onlineasciitools com convert-utf8-to-ascii However if you want to keep UTF-8 you can use  - - mode  python - -   - - coding  utf-8 - -

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If you are just trying to use UTF-8 characters or don t care if they are in your code  add this line to the top of your  py file    - - coding  utf-8 - -

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I had the same issue and just added this to the top of my file  in Python 3 I didn t have the problem but do in Python 2     usr local bin python   coding  latin-1

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For me the problem had caused due to       that symbol in the quotes  As i had copied the code from a pdf file it caused that error  I just replaced       by this

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After about a half hour of looking through stack overflow  It dawned on me that if the use of a single quote       in a comment will through the error   SyntaxError  Non-ASCII character   xe2  in file   After looking at the traceback i was able to locate the single quote used in my comment

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I had the same issue but it was because I copied and pasted the string as it is  Later when I manually typed the string as it is the error vanished    I had the error due to the - sign  When I replaced it with manually inputting a - the error was solved   Copied string 10   3   5  16 - 4   Manually typed string 10   3   5  16 - 4   you can clearly see there is a bit of difference between both the hyphens   I think it s because of the different formatting used by different OS or maybe just different software

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Plenty of good solutions here  One challenge not really addressed in any of them is how to visually identify certain hard-to-spot non-ASCII characters that resemble other plain ASCII ones  For example  en dashes can appear almost exactly like hyphens and curly quotes look a lot like straight quotes  depending on your text editor s font  This one-liner  which should work on Mac or Linux  will strip characters not in the ASCII printable range and show you the differences side-by-side    assumes Bash shell  for Bourne shell  sh   rearrange as a pipe and   give  -  as second argument to  sdiff  instead sdiff --suppress-common-lines script py  lt  tr -cd   11 12 15 40- 176   lt script py   The characters  11   12  and  15 are tab  newline  and carriage return  respectively  in octal  the remaining range is the visible ASCII characters   hat tip  Another tip gleaned from this SO thread uses an inverse character class consisting of anything not in the ASCII visible range  and highlights it  grep --color     -    script py  This should also work fine with the macOS   BSD version of grep

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I fixed this using pycharm  At the bottom of pycharm you can see file encoding  I noticed that it is UT-8  I changed it to US-ASCII

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You ve got a stray byte floating around   You can find it by running  with open  x py   as fp      for i  line in enumerate fp           if   xe2  in line              print i  repr line    where you should replace  x py  by the name of your program   You ll see the line number and the offending line s    For example  after inserting that byte arbitrarily  I got   4   xe2        lb   conn create load balancer  my lb     us-east-1a    us-east-1b     80  8080   http     443  8443   tcp     n

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If you want to spot what character caused this just assign the problematic variable to a string and print it in a iPython console   In my case  In  1   array     24 9  50 5     11 2  51 0            Raises an error  In  2   string      24 9  50 5     11 2  51 0          Manually paste the above array here  In  3   string Out  3      24 9  50 5  xe2 x80 x8b   11 2  51 0      Here they are

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xe2 is the  -  character  it appears in some copy and paste it uses a different equal looking  -  that causes encoding errors  Replace the  -  from copy paste  with the correct  -   from you keyboard button

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When I have a similar issue when reading text files i use     f   open  file   rt   errors  ignore

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Based on PEP 0263 -- Defining Python Source Code Encodings  Python will default to ASCII as standard encoding if no other encoding hints are given   To define a source code encoding  a magic comment must be placed into the source files either as first or second line in the file  such as           coding  lt encoding name gt   or  using formats recognized by popular editors            usr bin python         - - coding   lt encoding name gt  - -  or           usr bin python         vim  set fileencoding  lt encoding name gt

[python] Python "SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file"

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