How to Handle Unicode Text in Text Files: A Complete Guide to Error-Free Writing

Unicode Text in Text Files: A Comprehensive Guide for Error-Free Writing

Coding data extracted from a Google document can be challenging, especially when encountering non-ASCII symbols that need to be converted for HTML use. This guide provides a solution to handle Unicode text and prevent encoding errors.

Initially, converting everything to Unicode during data retrieval and writing it to a file may seem like the right approach. However, this method can lead to encoding errors due to the presence of non-ASCII symbols. To resolve this, it's crucial to deal exclusively with Unicode objects throughout the process.

When converting a Unicode object (u'Δ, Й, ק...') to a file-writable string, it's necessary to encode it to a unicode-encoded format:

<code class="python">foo = u'Δ, Й, ק, ‎ م, ๗, あ, 叶, 葉, and 말.'
f = open('test', 'w')
f.write(foo.encode('utf8'))
f.close()</code>

By encoding the Unicode object as 'utf8', it can be written to a file without encountering encoding errors.

When reading this file again, we must decode the unicode-encoded string object back to a Unicode object:

<code class="python">f = file('test', 'r')
print(f.read().decode('utf8'))</code>

By following these steps, Unicode text can be safely written to and read from text files while preventing encoding errors and ensuring that non-ASCII symbols are handled correctly.

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