To write Unicode text to a text file with Python, we can call the file handle's write method with a Unicode encoded string. We define the string foo with a Unicode string. Then we open the test file with open with write permission.
encode method does, and the result of encoding a unicode string is a bytestring (a str type.) You should either use normal open() and encode the unicode yourself, or (usually a better idea) use codecs. open() and not encode the data yourself.
txt) file is saved in an appropriate Unicode formatting. Saving a plain text document file as Unicode will allow you to use the text across multiple platforms and systems with minimal formatting changes.
Deal exclusively with unicode objects as much as possible by decoding things to unicode objects when you first get them and encoding them as necessary on the way out.
If your string is actually a unicode object, you'll need to convert it to a unicode-encoded string object before writing it to a file:
foo = u'Δ, Й, ק, م, ๗, あ, 叶, 葉, and 말.'
f = open('test', 'w')
f.write(foo.encode('utf8'))
f.close()
When you read that file again, you'll get a unicode-encoded string that you can decode to a unicode object:
f = file('test', 'r')
print f.read().decode('utf8')
In Python 2.6+, you could use io.open()
that is default (builtin open()
) on Python 3:
import io
with io.open(filename, 'w', encoding=character_encoding) as file:
file.write(unicode_text)
It might be more convenient if you need to write the text incrementally (you don't need to call unicode_text.encode(character_encoding)
multiple times). Unlike codecs
module, io
module has a proper universal newlines support.
Unicode string handling is already standardized in Python 3.
You only need to open file in utf-8
(32-bit Unicode to variable-byte-length utf-8 conversion is automatically performed from memory to file.)
out1 = "(嘉南大圳 ㄐㄧㄚ ㄋㄢˊ ㄉㄚˋ ㄗㄨㄣˋ )"
fobj = open("t1.txt", "w", encoding="utf-8")
fobj.write(out1)
fobj.close()
Make sure your viewer/editor/terminal (however you are interacting with your utf-8 encoded file) can read the file. This is frequently an issue on Windows, for example, Notepad.
Writing Unicode text to a text file?
In Python 2, use open
from the io
module (this is the same as the builtin open
in Python 3):
import io
Best practice, in general, use UTF-8
for writing to files (we don't even have to worry about byte-order with utf-8).
encoding = 'utf-8'
utf-8 is the most modern and universally usable encoding - it works in all web browsers, most text-editors (see your settings if you have issues) and most terminals/shells.
On Windows, you might try utf-16le
if you're limited to viewing output in Notepad (or another limited viewer).
encoding = 'utf-16le' # sorry, Windows users... :(
And just open it with the context manager and write your unicode characters out:
with io.open(filename, 'w', encoding=encoding) as f:
f.write(unicode_object)
Here's an example that attempts to map every possible character up to three bits wide (4 is the max, but that would be going a bit far) from the digital representation (in integers) to an encoded printable output, along with its name, if possible (put this into a file called uni.py
):
from __future__ import print_function
import io
from unicodedata import name, category
from curses.ascii import controlnames
from collections import Counter
try: # use these if Python 2
unicode_chr, range = unichr, xrange
except NameError: # Python 3
unicode_chr = chr
exclude_categories = set(('Co', 'Cn'))
counts = Counter()
control_names = dict(enumerate(controlnames))
with io.open('unidata', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
for x in range((2**8)**3):
try:
char = unicode_chr(x)
except ValueError:
continue # can't map to unicode, try next x
cat = category(char)
counts.update((cat,))
if cat in exclude_categories:
continue # get rid of noise & greatly shorten result file
try:
uname = name(char)
except ValueError: # probably control character, don't use actual
uname = control_names.get(x, '')
f.write(u'{0:>6x} {1} {2}\n'.format(x, cat, uname))
else:
f.write(u'{0:>6x} {1} {2} {3}\n'.format(x, cat, char, uname))
# may as well describe the types we logged.
for cat, count in counts.items():
print('{0} chars of category, {1}'.format(count, cat))
This should run in the order of about a minute, and you can view the data file, and if your file viewer can display unicode, you'll see it. Information about the categories can be found here. Based on the counts, we can probably improve our results by excluding the Cn and Co categories, which have no symbols associated with them.
$ python uni.py
It will display the hexadecimal mapping, category, symbol (unless can't get the name, so probably a control character), and the name of the symbol. e.g.
I recommend less
on Unix or Cygwin (don't print/cat the entire file to your output):
$ less unidata
e.g. will display similar to the following lines which I sampled from it using Python 2 (unicode 5.2):
0 Cc NUL
20 Zs SPACE
21 Po ! EXCLAMATION MARK
b6 So ¶ PILCROW SIGN
d0 Lu Ð LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ETH
e59 Nd ๙ THAI DIGIT NINE
2887 So ⢇ BRAILLE PATTERN DOTS-1238
bc13 Lo 밓 HANGUL SYLLABLE MIH
ffeb Sm → HALFWIDTH RIGHTWARDS ARROW
My Python 3.5 from Anaconda has unicode 8.0, I would presume most 3's would.
The file opened by codecs.open
is a file that takes unicode
data, encodes it in iso-8859-1
and writes it to the file. However, what you try to write isn't unicode
; you take unicode
and encode it in iso-8859-1
yourself. That's what the unicode.encode
method does, and the result of encoding a unicode string is a bytestring (a str
type.)
You should either use normal open()
and encode the unicode yourself, or (usually a better idea) use codecs.open()
and not encode the data yourself.
How to print unicode characters into a file:
Save this to file: foo.py:
#!/usr/bin/python -tt
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import codecs
import sys
UTF8Writer = codecs.getwriter('utf8')
sys.stdout = UTF8Writer(sys.stdout)
print(u'e with obfuscation: é')
Run it and pipe output to file:
python foo.py > tmp.txt
Open tmp.txt and look inside, you see this:
el@apollo:~$ cat tmp.txt
e with obfuscation: é
Thus you have saved unicode e with a obfuscation mark on it to a file.
That error arises when you try to encode a non-unicode string: it tries to decode it, assuming it's in plain ASCII. There are two possibilities:
f.write(all_html)
instead..encode(...)
, it first tries to decode it.If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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