Clash Royale CLAN TAG#URR8PPP

'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x8a in position 170: invalid start byte

I am trying to do this:

fh = request.FILES['csv']
fh = io.StringIO(fh.read().decode())
reader = csv.DictReader(fh, delimiter=";")


This is failing always with the error in title and I spent almost 8 hours on this.

here is my understanding:

I am using python3, so file fh is in bytes. I am encoding it into string and putting it in memory via StringIO.

fh

with csv.DictReader() trying to read it as dict into memory. It is failing here:

csv.DictReader()

also tried with io.StringIO(fh.read().decode('utf-8')), but same error.

io.StringIO(fh.read().decode('utf-8'))

what am I missing? :/

1 Answer
1

The error is because there is some non-ASCII character in the file and it can't be encoded/decoded. One simple way to avoid this error is to encode/decode such strings with encode()/decode() function as follows (if a is the string with non-ASCII character):

a.decode('utf-8')

a.decode('utf-8')

Also, you could try opening the file as:

with open('filename', 'r', encoding = 'utf-8') as f:
your code using f as file pointer

with open('filename', 'r', encoding = 'utf-8') as f:
your code using f as file pointer

use 'rb' if your file is binary.

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