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I have created a package using the encoding utf-8.

When calling a function, it returns a DataFrame, with a column coded in utf-8.

When using IPython at the command line, I don't have any problems showing the content of this table. When using the Notebook, it crashes with the error 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe7. I've attached a full traceback below.

What is the proper encoding to work with Notebook?

UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-13-92c0011919e7> in <module>()
      3 ver = verif.VerificacaoNA()
      4 comp, total = ver.executarCompRealFisica(DT_INI, DT_FIN)
----> 5 comp

c:\Python27-32\lib\site-packages\ipython-0.13.1-py2.7.egg\IPython\core\displayhook.pyc in __call__(self, result)
    240             self.update_user_ns(result)
    241             self.log_output(format_dict)
--> 242             self.finish_displayhook()
    243 
    244     def flush(self):

c:\Python27-32\lib\site-packages\ipython-0.13.1-py2.7.egg\IPython\zmq\displayhook.pyc in finish_displayhook(self)
     59         sys.stdout.flush()
     60         sys.stderr.flush()
---> 61         self.session.send(self.pub_socket, self.msg, ident=self.topic)
     62         self.msg = None
     63 

c:\Python27-32\lib\site-packages\ipython-0.13.1-py2.7.egg\IPython\zmq\session.pyc in send(self, stream, msg_or_type, content, parent, ident, buffers, subheader, track, header)
    557 
    558         buffers = [] if buffers is None else buffers
--> 559         to_send = self.serialize(msg, ident)
    560         flag = 0
    561         if buffers:

c:\Python27-32\lib\site-packages\ipython-0.13.1-py2.7.egg\IPython\zmq\session.pyc in serialize(self, msg, ident)
    461             content = self.none
    462         elif isinstance(content, dict):
--> 463             content = self.pack(content)
    464         elif isinstance(content, bytes):
    465             # content is already packed, as in a relayed message

c:\Python27-32\lib\site-packages\ipython-0.13.1-py2.7.egg\IPython\zmq\session.pyc in <lambda>(obj)
     76 
     77 # ISO8601-ify datetime objects
---> 78 json_packer = lambda obj: jsonapi.dumps(obj, default=date_default)
     79 json_unpacker = lambda s: extract_dates(jsonapi.loads(s))
     80 

c:\Python27-32\lib\site-packages\pyzmq-13.0.0-py2.7-win32.egg\zmq\utils\jsonapi.pyc in dumps(o, **kwargs)
     70         kwargs['separators'] = (',', ':')
     71 
---> 72     return _squash_unicode(jsonmod.dumps(o, **kwargs))
     73 
     74 def loads(s, **kwargs):

c:\Python27-32\lib\json\__init__.pyc in dumps(obj, skipkeys, ensure_ascii, check_circular, allow_nan, cls, indent, separators, encoding, default, **kw)
    236         check_circular=check_circular, allow_nan=allow_nan, indent=indent,
    237         separators=separators, encoding=encoding, default=default,
--> 238         **kw).encode(obj)
    239 
    240 

c:\Python27-32\lib\json\encoder.pyc in encode(self, o)
    199         # exceptions aren't as detailed.  The list call should be roughly
    200         # equivalent to the PySequence_Fast that ''.join() would do.
--> 201         chunks = self.iterencode(o, _one_shot=True)
    202         if not isinstance(chunks, (list, tuple)):
    203             chunks = list(chunks)

c:\Python27-32\lib\json\encoder.pyc in iterencode(self, o, _one_shot)
    262                 self.key_separator, self.item_separator, self.sort_keys,
    263                 self.skipkeys, _one_shot)
--> 264         return _iterencode(o, 0)
    265 
    266 def _make_iterencode(markers, _default, _encoder, _indent, _floatstr,

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe7 in position 199: invalid continuation byte
Carl Smith
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Adriano Almeida
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  • I've had this happen when I had embedded smart quotes as values in either a index or column name. Not sure what encoding to use to get around it, but when I removed the smart quotes, the problem went away. – bdiamante Mar 15 '13 at 00:39
  • I have set the column to latin-1 and the error went away but the string show the unknown characeters – Adriano Almeida Mar 15 '13 at 13:38
  • Can you post a minimal code sample that demonstrates the problem? – Thomas K Mar 15 '13 at 18:23

1 Answers1

21

I had the same problem recently, and indeed setting the default encoding to UTF-8 did the trick:

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

Running sys.getdefaultencoding() yielded 'ascii' on my environment (Python 2.7.3), so I guess that's the default.

Also see this related question and Ian Bicking's blog post on the subject.

Community
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assaflavi
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    It is not a good idea to use setdefaultencoding, see for instance [here](http://stackoverflow.com/a/3580165/1661267), for instance, it disables the `print` command. – mountrix Jan 21 '17 at 21:09
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    On Python 2, the default is ascii. Just on python 3 the default is utf-8. – Josir Jul 07 '18 at 22:20
  • This is deprecated: Python 3 has no `sys.setdefaultencoding()` function. – ttoshiro Aug 14 '22 at 06:26