Function throws a SyntaxError: (unicode error)

Question

I am running the following code in python and it's giving me this error:

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

---

def filePro(filename):
    f=open(filename,'r')
    wordcount=0
    for lines in f:
         f1=lines.split()
         wordcount=wordcount+len(f1)
    f.close()
    print ('word count:'), str(wordcount)

Please help me.

Answer 1

Unicode literals (String literals in Python 3.x) with \U or \u escape sequence should be one of following forms:

>>> u'\U00000061' # 8 hexadecimals
'a'
>>> u'\u0061'     # 4 hexadecimals
'a'

If there's not enough escape sequence, you get a SyntaxError.

>>> u'\u61'
  File "<stdin>", line 1
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 0-3: truncated \uXXXX escape
>>> u'\U000061'
  File "<stdin>", line 1
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 0-7: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

---

If you mean literal \ and U. You'd better to use raw string:

>>> r'\u0061'
'\\u0061'
>>> print(r'\u0061')
\u0061

In the code you posted, there's no unicode escape sequence. You should Check other part of your code.

Answer 2

Not sure, not much information provided here, but I guess python is trying to open the file with wrong encoding, you could open the file with the codecs library, use the correct codec to open the file, if I don't know or if it comes from windows I usually use 'cp1252' as this can open most types.

import codecs

def filePro(filename):
    f = codecs.open(filename, 'r', 'cp1252'):
    wordcount=0
    for lines in f:
         f1=lines.split()
         wordcount=wordcount+len(f1)
    f.close()
    print ('word count:'), str(wordcount)

Another possibillity is that you have a filename that python translates to code, for example a file name like 'c:\Users\something' here the \U will be interpret. See this answer