UnicodeEncodeError after using ü in loop variable

Comments

• sebastiaan

  February 2016 edited 6:15PM

  Hi Stefan,

  I suspect that this bit:

  'Word_' + var.word
  

  ... works fine, and returns a unicode object (e.g. u'Word_glücklich'). You can try this by just doing the concatenation on it's own, not embedded in a larger command.

  So the question is: What is slideChangeEvent or sendMessage doing that triggers a UnicodeEncodeError? Without seeing the full code I cannot tell!

  Cheers,
  Sebastiaan

  
  
  Check out SigmundAI.eu for our OpenSesame AI assistant!
  
• Eru_Iluvatar

  February 2016 edited February 2016

  Hi Sebastiaan

  You're right of course, a simple print('word' + var.word) is working fine.

  sendMessage()takes the string provided by slideChangeEvent() to send a message through a TCP socket to the external API of iMotions where we capture the people's facial responses together with markers sent from OpenSesame.

  The relevant code is the following:

  import socket
  
  ### Some global settings/variables used
  lnbr = '\r\n'
  IP = "127.0.0.1"
  EAPI_PORT = 8089        # iMotions external API
  CTRL_PORT = 8087        # iMotions Remote Control
  # iMotions parameters
  studyName = 'GamblingGame'  
  subjectName = str(var.subject_nr)
  
  # setup sockets and connect
  sockExtAPI = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
  sockExtAPI.connect((IP, EAPI_PORT))
  sockCTRL = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM)
  sockCTRL.connect((IP, CTRL_PORT))
  
  # send external API message (mouseEvent or slideChangeEvent)    
  def sendMessage(message):
      sockExtAPI.send(message)
      #response = sockCTRL.recv(4092)
      log.write('ExtAPI message sent: ' + message)
  
  def slideChangeEvent(slideID):
      # discrete header
      # version 2
      header = 'M;2;'
      # field 5: slideID
      # field 7: marker type N
      # (marks the start of the next segment, automatically closing any currently
      # open segment.)
      event = ';;' + slideID + ';;N;I'
      return header + event + lnbr
  

  Edit: nevermind my previous edit
• sebastiaan

  February 2016 edited 6:15PM

  I suspect the bad guy is here:

  sockExtAPI.send(message)
  

  In your case, message is a unicode object, which will be automatically converted to a str object. Kind of like this:

  _message = str(message)
  sockExtAPI.send(_message)
  

  And this goes wrong, because the default is assumed is ascii, which doesn't contain special characters. To make this unicode-safe, you need to explicitly say which character encoding you want to use. For example:

  _message = message.encode('utf-8')
  sockExtAPI.send(_message)
  

  This will send the message as a utf-8 encoded bytestring. Whether the receiver will take kindly to that is, of course, another matter.

  Cheers,
  Sebastiaan

  
  
  Check out SigmundAI.eu for our OpenSesame AI assistant!
  
• Eru_Iluvatar

  February 2016 edited 6:15PM

  sockExtAPI.send(message.encode('utf-8')) did the trick at least inside OpenSesame. However, write.log(message.encode('uft-8'))gives this funny mixture of symbols, same in the exported data from iMotions.

  Hm, looks like we will need to encode the stimuli differently.
  But thank you very much for your patience. I'm far from being experienced in python... :-)

  Cheers,
  Stefan
• sebastiaan

  February 2016 edited 6:15PM

  However, write.log(message.encode('uft-8'))gives this funny mixture of symbols, same in the exported data from iMotions.

  The (very common) mistake that you're making is thinking that the problem lies in how the file is written, whereas it lies in how you're reading it. The OpenSesame log file is fine, but it's utf-8 encoded. If it looks funny, this is because the text editor/ spreadsheet has used the wrong encoding to read it, and you'll have to explicitly tell it to use utf-8.

  See also:

  • http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/usage/logging/

  (I should write a blog about character encoding one of these days. It's really one of the main issues that people struggle with.)

  
  
  Check out SigmundAI.eu for our OpenSesame AI assistant!
  
• carlhyde

  April 2021 edited April 2021

  On Windows, many editors assume the default ANSI encoding (CP1252 on US Windows) instead of UTF-8 if there is no byte order mark (BOM) character at the start of the file. Files store bytes, which means all unicode have to be encoded into bytes before they can be stored in a file. read_csv takes an encoding option to deal with files in different formats. So, you have to specify an encoding, such as utf-8.

   df.to_csv('D:\panda.csv',sep='\t',encoding='utf-8')

  If you don't specify an encoding, then the encoding used by df.tocsv defaults to ascii in Python2, or utf-8 in Python3.

  Also, you can encode a problematic series first then decode it back to utf-8.

  df['column-name'] = df['column-name'].map(lambda x: x.encode('unicode-escape').decode('utf-8'))

  This will also rectify the problem.
• lvanderlinden

  April 2021

  Thanks so much for your contribution @carlhyde !

  Did you like my answer? Feel free to