[python] "Unicode Error "unicodeescape" codec can't decode bytes... Cannot open text files in Python 3

I am using Python 3.1 on a Windows 7 machine. Russian is the default system language, and utf-8 is the default encoding.

Looking at the answer to a previous question, I have attempting using the "codecs" module to give me a little luck. Here's a few examples:

>>> g = codecs.open("C:\Users\Eric\Desktop\beeline.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-4: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape (<pyshell#39>, line 1)

>>> g = codecs.open("C:\Users\Eric\Desktop\Site.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-4: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape (<pyshell#40>, line 1)

>>> g = codecs.open("C:\Python31\Notes.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 11-12: malformed \N character escape (<pyshell#41>, line 1)

>>> g = codecs.open("C:\Users\Eric\Desktop\Site.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8")
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-4: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape (<pyshell#44>, line 1)

My last idea was, I thought it might have been the fact that Windows "translates" a few folders, such as the "users" folder, into Russian (though typing "users" is still the correct path), so I tried it in the Python31 folder. Still, no luck. Any ideas?

I had this same error in python 3.2.

I have script for email sending and:

csv.reader(open('work_dir\uslugi1.csv', newline='', encoding='utf-8'))

when I remove first char in file uslugi1.csv works fine.

Prefixing with 'r' works very well, but it needs to be in the correct syntax. For example:

passwordFile = open(r'''C:\Users\Bob\SecretPasswordFile.txt''')

No need for \\ here - maintains readability and works well.

With Python 3 I had this problem:

 self.path = 'T:\PythonScripts\Projects\Utilities'

produced this error:

 self.path = 'T:\PythonScripts\Projects\Utilities'
            ^
 SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in
 position 25-26: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

the fix that worked is:

 self.path = r'T:\PythonScripts\Projects\Utilities'

It seems the '\U' was producing an error and the 'r' preceding the string turns off the eight-character Unicode escape (for a raw string) which was failing. (This is a bit of an over-simplification, but it works if you don't care about unicode)

Hope this helps someone

I had this error. I have a main python script which calls in functions from another, 2nd, python script. At the end of the first script I had a comment block designated with ''' '''. I was getting this error because of this commenting code block. I repeated the error multiple times once I found it to ensure this was the error, & it was. I am still unsure why.

path = pd.read_csv(**'C:\Users\mravi\Desktop\filename'**)

The error is because of the path that is mentioned

Add 'r' before the path

path = pd.read_csv(**r'C:\Users\mravi\Desktop\filename'**)

This would work fine.

I had same error, just uninstalled and installed again the numpy package, that worked!

Typical error on Windows because the default user directory is C:\user\<your_user>, so when you want to use this path as an string parameter into a Python function, you get a Unicode error, just because the \u is a Unicode escape. Any character not numeric after this produces an error.

To solve it, just double the backslashes: C:\\user\\<\your_user>...

Or you could replace '\' with '/' in the path.

Refer to openpyxl document, you can do changes as followings.

from openpyxl import Workbook
from openpyxl.drawing.image import Image

wb = Workbook()
ws = wb.active
ws['A1'] = 'Insert a xxx.PNG'
# Reload an image
img = Image(**r**'x:\xxx\xxx\xxx.png')
# Insert to worksheet and anchor next to cells
ws.add_image(img, 'A2')
wb.save(**r**'x:\xxx\xxx.xlsx')