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pythonutf-8character-encodingbyte-order-mark

Write to UTF-8 file in Python


I'm really confused with the codecs.open function. When I do:

file = codecs.open("temp", "w", "utf-8")
file.write(codecs.BOM_UTF8)
file.close()

It gives me the error

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

If I do:

file = open("temp", "w")
file.write(codecs.BOM_UTF8)
file.close()

It works fine.

Question is why does the first method fail? And how do I insert the bom?

If the second method is the correct way of doing it, what the point of using codecs.open(filename, "w", "utf-8")?


Solution

  • I believe the problem is that codecs.BOM_UTF8 is a byte string, not a Unicode string. I suspect the file handler is trying to guess what you really mean based on "I'm meant to be writing Unicode as UTF-8-encoded text, but you've given me a byte string!"

    Try writing the Unicode string for the byte order mark (i.e. Unicode U+FEFF) directly, so that the file just encodes that as UTF-8:

    import codecs
    
    file = codecs.open("lol", "w", "utf-8")
    file.write(u'\ufeff')
    file.close()
    

    (That seems to give the right answer - a file with bytes EF BB BF.)

    EDIT: S. Lott's suggestion of using "utf-8-sig" as the encoding is a better one than explicitly writing the BOM yourself, but I'll leave this answer here as it explains what was going wrong before.