“Unicode Error ”unicodeescape" codec can't decode bytes… Cannot open text files in Python 3 [duplicate]

Answer 1

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>...

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

The problem is with the string

"C:\Users\Eric\Desktop\beeline.txt"

Here, \U in "C:\Users... starts an eight-character Unicode escape, such as \U00014321. In your code, the escape is followed by the character 's', which is invalid.

You either need to duplicate all backslashes:

"C:\\Users\\Eric\\Desktop\\beeline.txt"

Or prefix the string with r (to produce a raw string):

r"C:\Users\Eric\Desktop\beeline.txt"

Answer 6

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.