If I check the charset of a file that I'm reading from I get:
text/plain; charset=us-ascii
So I am reading it in like:
File.open(#file_path, r:ASCII) do |f|
f.each_line do |line|
line = line.rstrip.force_encoding("ASCII")
Which works fine until I hit this line:
"Seat 2: tchin\xE9 ($423 in chips)"
Where I get this error:
ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII
This line looks like this in my text editor:
"Seat 2: tchin? ($423 in chips)"
If I try reading it in as UTF-8 instead of ASCII, I get the same error:
ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8
Any ideas of what I should be doing. I have tried using iconv to convert it from ASCII to UTF-8 and and I get this error:
Iconv::IllegalSequence: "\xE9 ($423 in chips"
ASCII is a 7-bit encoding (max 127, 128 characters), not 8 bit (max 255, 256 characters).
E9 (Decimal 233, probably a é) is higher then 128. So you have no ASCII, the ruby error message is correct.
I expect it is cp1252.
Update:
I'm quiet sure, it is a é. The sentence "Seat 2: tchiné ($423 in chips)" makes sense (I don't know what it is, but it seems to be something in Poker.
This line looks like this in my text editor:
"Seat 2: tchin? ($423 in chips)"
Your editor may not display the é, so it displays a substitute character.
Reading the file as "r:ISO8859-1" worked.
Related
I work with a payment API and it returns some XML. For logging I want to save the API response in my database.
One word in the API is "manhã" but the API returns "manh�". Other chars like á ou ç are being returned correctly, this is some bug in the API I guess.
But when trying to save this in my DB I get:
Postgres invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xc3 0x2f
How can I solve this?
I tried things like
response.encode("UTF-8") and also force_encode but all I get is:
Encoding::UndefinedConversionError ("\xC3" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8)
I need to either remove this wrong character or convert it somehow.
You’re on the right track - you should be able to solve the problem with the encode method - when the source encoding is known you should be able to simply use:
response.encode(‘UTF-8’, ‘ISO-8859-1’)
There may be times where there are invalid characters in the source encoding, and to get around exceptions, you can instruct ruby how to handle them:
# This will transcode the string to UTF-8 and replace any invalid/undefined characters with ‘’ (empty string)
response.encode(‘UTF-8’, 'ISO-8859-1', invalid: :replace, undef: :replace, replace: ‘’)
This is all laid out in the Ruby docs for String - check them out!
—--
Note, many people incorrectly assume that force_encode will somehow fix encoding problems. force_encode simply tags the string as the specified encoding - it does not transcode and replace/remove the invalid characters. When you're converting between encodings, you must transcode so that characters in one character set are correctly represented in the other character set.
As pointed out in the comment section, you can use force_encoding to transcode your string if you used: response.force_encoding('ISO-8859-1').encode('UTF-8') (which is equivalent to the first example using encode above).
I have a file with an old format from the 70s used in Companies House (UK company registry).
I inherited a parser written 6 years ago which goes line by line and according to a set of conditions extracts the information from the line and inserts them into a dictionary.
There is a weird character that is breaking a line.
I copied this line to a new file awk '{if(NR==33411) print $0}' PROD216_1950_ew_1.dat > broken and opend broken in vim.
Turns out that weird character is read by vim a <85>.
The result is that everything after MAYFIELD is read as a new line.
Below the line in question:
000376702103032986930001 1993010119941024 193709 0105<BARRY ALEXANDER<GROSVENOR<<<<MAYFIELD 3<41 PLANTATION ROAD<THE PEAK<<HONG KONG<BANK EXECUTIVE<BRITISH<<
in vim becomes
000376702103032986930001 1993010119941024 193709 0105<BARRY ALEXANDER<GROSVENOR<<<<MAYFIELD <85>3<41 PLANTATION ROAD<THE PEAK<<HONG KONG<BANK EXECUTIVE<BRITISH<<
I am using codecs to read this file with a context manager, which I thought was the way of going about it -
Is there anything I am missing? What is that <85>?
with codecs.open(filepath, 'r', 'utf-8') as fh:
for line in fh:
linetype = determine_line_type(line)
if linetype == 'header':
continue
elif linetype == 'company':
do stuff...
elif linetype == 'officer':
do stuff...
vim shows <85> to indicate a hex 85 byte that is invalid in the current encoding (i.e., the encoding it's using to decode the file).
My guess is that the file's encoding is Windows-1252, in which hex 85 denotes the ellipsis character.
So the solution for your parser might be as simple as changing 'utf-8' to 'cp1252' in the codecs.open call.
After going around for some time here and here I came up with this solution, which works.
with open(filepath, encoding='utf-8') as fh:
for line in fh:
byteline = bytearray(line, encoding='utf-8').replace(b'\xc2\x85', b'')
line_clean = byteline.decode(encoding='utf-8')
# do stuff with clean line.
Knowing that the byte sequence that breaks the string is b'\xc2\x85' (it is interpreted as an ... ellipsis character.
First encode the string to an array of bytes with bytearray, then use replace method of the bytearray class, finally, decode the clean line using the decode method, which will return the string without the weird character from before the transformation.
In Ruby 1.9.3-429, I am trying to parse plain text files with various encodings that will ultimately be converted to UTF-8 strings. Non-ascii characters work fine with a file encoded as UTF-8, but problems come up with non-UTF-8 files.
Simplified example:
File.open(file) do |io|
io.set_encoding("#{charset.upcase}:#{Encoding::UTF_8}")
line, char = "", nil
until io.eof? || char == ?\n || char == ?\r
char = io.readchar
puts "Character #{char} has #{char.each_codepoint.count} codepoints"
puts "SLICE FAIL" unless char == char.slice(0,1)
line << char
end
line
end
Both files are just a single string áÁð encoded appropriately. I have checked that the files have been encoded correctly via $ file -i <file_name>
With a UTF-8 file, I get back:
Character á has 1 codepoints
Character Á has 1 codepoints
Character ð has 1 codepoints
With an ISO-8859-1 file:
Character á has 2 codepoints
SLICE FAIL
Character Á has 2 codepoints
SLICE FAIL
Character ð has 2 codepoints
SLICE FAIL
The way I am interpreting this is readchar is returning an incorrectly converted encoding which is causing slice to return incorrectly.
Is this behavior correct? Or am I specifying the file external encoding incorrectly? I would rather not rewrite this process so I am hoping I am making a mistake somewhere. There are reasons why I am parsing files this way, but I don't think those are relevant to my question. Specifying the internal and external encoding as an option in File.open yielded the same results.
This behavior is a bug. See http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8516 for details.
I'm trying to process a German word list and can't figure out what encoding the file is in. The 'file' unix command says the file is "Non-ISO extended-ASCII text". Most of the words are in ascii, but here are the exceptions:
ANDR\x82
ATTACH\x82
C\x82ZANNE
CH\x83TEAU
CONF\x82RENCIER
FABERG\x82
L\x82VI-STRAUSS
RH\x93NETAL
P\xF2ANGE
Any hints would be great. Thanks!
EDIT: To be clear, the hex codes above are C hex string literals so replace \xXX with the literal hex value XX.
It looks like CP437 or CP852, assuming the \x82 sequences encode single characters, and are not literally four characters. Well, at least everything else does, but the last line is a bit of a puzzle.
I've parsed an HTML page with mochiweb_html and want to parse the following text fragment
0 – 1
Basically I want to split the string on the spaces and dash character and extract the numbers in the first characters.
Now the string above is represented as the following Erlang list
[48,32,226,128,147,32,49]
I'm trying to split it using the following regex:
{ok, P}=re:compile("\\xD2\\x80\\x93"), %% characters 226, 128, 147
re:split([48,32,226,128,147,32,49], P, [{return, list}])
But this doesn't work; it seems the \xD2 character is the problem [if I remove it from the regex, the split occurs]
Could someone possibly explain
what I'm doing wrong here ?
why the '–' character seemingly requires three integers for representation [226, 128, 147]
Thanks.
226,128,147 is E2,80,93 in hex.
> {ok, P} = re:compile("\xE2\x80\x93").
...
> re:split([48,32,226,128,147,32,49], P, [{return, list}]).
["0 "," 1"]
As to your second question, about why a dash takes 3 bytes to encode, it's because the dash in your input isn't an ASCII hyphen (hex 2D), but is a Unicode en-dash (hex 2013). Your code is recieving this in UTF-8 encoding, rather than the more obvious UCS-2 encoding. Hex 2013 comes out to hex E28093 in UTF-8 encoding.
If your next question is "why UTF-8", it's because it's far easier to retrofit an old system using 8-bit characters and null-terminated C style strings to use Unicode via UTF-8 than to widen everything to UCS-2 or UCS-4. UTF-8 remains compatible with ASCII and C strings, so the conversion can be done piecemeal over the course of years, or decades if need be. Wide characters require a "Big Bang" one-time conversion effort, where everything has to move to the new system at once. UTF-8 is therefore far more popular on systems with legacies dating back to before the early 90s, when Unicode was created.