Jaroslav Dobrek, 26.07.2012 12:51: >>> try: >>> for line in f: # here text is decoded implicitly >>> do_something() >>> except UnicodeDecodeError(): >>> do_something_different() > > the code above (without the brackets) is semantically bad: The > exception is not caught.
Sure it is. Just to repeat myself: if the above doesn't catch the exception, then the exception did not originate from the place where you think it did. Again: look at the traceback. >>> The problem is that vast majority of the thousands of files that I >>> process are correctly encoded. But then, suddenly, there is a bad >>> character in a new file. (This is so because most files today are >>> generated by people who don't know that there is such a thing as >>> encodings.) And then I need to rewrite my very complex program just >>> because of one single character in one single file. >> >> Why would that be the case? The places to change should be very local in >> your code. > > This is the case in a program that has many different functions which > open and parse different > types of files. When I read and parse a directory with such different > types of files, a program that > uses > > for line in f: > > will not exit with any hint as to where the error occurred. I just > exits with a UnicodeDecodeError. ... that tells you the exact code line where the error occurred. No need to look around. Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list