I want to read a file that contains also German and not only characters. I found that i can do like this
>>> import codecs >>> file = codecs.open('file.txt','r', encoding='UTF-8') >>> lines= file.readlines() This is working when i try to run my job in Python IDLE but when i try to run it from somewhere else does not give correct result. Have a idea?
You need to know which character encoding the text is encoded in. If you don't know that beforehand, you can try guessing it with the chardet module. First install it:
$ pip install chardet Then, for example reading the file in binary mode:
>>> import chardet >>> chardet.detect(open("file.txt", "rb").read()) {'confidence': 0.9690625, 'encoding': 'utf-8'} So then:
>>> import codecs >>> import unicodedata >>> lines = codecs.open('file.txt', 'r', encoding='utf-8').readlines() 
import codecsI believe the file is being read correctly but is using the wrong encoding when output. This is based on the fact that you get the proper results in IDLE.
I would suggest trying to use print(line.encode('utf-8')) but I'm afraid I don't know if Python 3 will print a bytes object properly.
open('file.txt', 'rb').readlines(), and then useprint(repr(line))for a line that you know contains the German characters, as well as what you expect it to be. This should help us determine what the encoding is.readlines()probably doesn't work in binary mode, tryprint(repr(open('file.txt', 'rb').read())), and then post all or a portion of the output.