Switching to Python 3 causing UnicodeDecodeError

Question

I\'ve just added Python3 interpreter to Sublime, and the following code stopped working:

for directory in directoryList:
    fileList = os.listdir(directory)         


        

Answer 1

In general, I found 3 ways to fix Unicode related Errors in Python3:

1. Use the encoding explicitly like currentFile = open(filename, 'rt',encoding='utf-8')

2. As the bytes have no encoding, convert the string data to bytes before writing to file like data = 'string'.encode('utf-8')

3. Especially in Linux environment, check $LANG. Such issue usually arises when LANG=C which makes default encoding as 'ascii' instead of 'utf-8'. One can change it with other appropriate value like LANG='en_IN'