SyntaxError: unicodeescape

Question

I am trying to build a bot which gives a random answer from CSV file. Piece of code I have problem with:

def get_data(lounaslista):
    with open('C:\Users\p7l1n\Desktop\lounasbotti\lounaslista.csv', 'r') as f:
        r = csv.reader(f)
        data = [row for row in r]
    return data

Error I'm getting:

SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

I tried solutions from following post.

Your imput csv isn't in (correct) unicode. Either it's in another encoding, or you need to fix the mojibake. In either case this has nothing to do with python. — 2e0byo, Oct 26 '22 at 11:36
The linked post is orthogonal to the issue here (csv encoding). — 2e0byo, Oct 26 '22 at 11:36
Hi, welcome to Stack Overflow! What encoding is your text file? Can you try reading it with a different encoding? — Ari Cooper-Davis, Oct 26 '22 at 11:38
Does this answer your question? [Windows path in Python](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2953834/windows-path-in-python) — Donald Duck, Oct 26 '22 at 13:04

ErnestBidouille · Answer 1 · 2022-10-26T11:48:13.997

Use double slash instead of simple slash in path.

def get_data(lounaslista):
    with open('C:\\Users\\p7l1n\\Desktop\\lounasbotti\\lounaslista.csv', 'r') as f:
        r = csv.reader(f)
        data = [row for row in r]
    return data

Example with simple variable:

a = 'C:\Users\p7l1n\Desktop\lounasbotti\lounaslista.csv'
# SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

# With double slash:
a = 'C:\\Users\\p7l1n\\Desktop\\lounasbotti\\lounaslista.csv'
print(a)  # C:\Users\p7l1n\Desktop\lounasbotti\lounaslista.csv

# Or use raw string:
a = r'C:\Users\p7l1n\Desktop\lounasbotti\lounaslista.csv'
print(a)  # C:\Users\p7l1n\Desktop\lounasbotti\lounaslista.csv

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 26 '22 at 11:47

The backslash character in strings is used as an escape character. For example \n is a newline, \" and \' can be used to insert " and ' into string literals without terminating those literals. You can also write \U00000000 to insert a character with that code point (instead of 00000000 you can have any hexadecimal number).

To insert a literal backslash, you have to escape the backslash, like so: \\

For Windows file paths, this gets a bit tedious, so there is an alternative: raw string literals, like so: r'C:\Users\p7l1n\Desktop\lounasbotti\lounaslista.csv'. This disables escape sequences.

A third option is to use forward slashes instead: 'C:/Users/p7l1n/Desktop/lounasbotti/lounaslista.csv'. Windows generally accepts forward slashes as an alternative path separator.

SyntaxError: unicodeescape

2 Answers2