UnicodeDecodeError issue

[Dave Angel]

On 2/9/2013 00:16, Ferrous Cranus wrote:


>>
>> Have you tried to decode those bytes in various encodings other than
>> utf-8 ?
>
>
> No, because i wasn't aware of what string/variable they were pertaining at.
>
>

  http://pypi.python.org/pypi/chardet

is a package which tries to 'guess' an encoding for a string of bytes. 
I happen to have the 2.7 version installed, but not the 3.x version, so
the following is in 2.7. Same thing should work in 3.3....

>>> chardet.detect(b'\xb6\xe3\xed\xf9\xf3\xf4\xef\xfc\xed\xef\xec\xe1 \xf3\xf5\xf3\xf4\xde\xec\xe1\xf4\xef\xf2')
{'confidence': 0.9638983132261467, 'encoding': 'windows-1253'}
>>> print b'\xb6\xe3\xed\xf9\xf3\xf4\xef\xfc\xed\xef\xec\xe1 \xf3\xf5\xf3\xf4\xde\xec\xe1\xf4\xef\xf2'.decode('windows-1253')
¶γνωστοόνομα συστήματος


I don't have a clue what it might be;  it's not English, and I don't
know whatever language it may be in.

Does that string make any sense to you?  You may want to try it on your
own machine, since the email may obscure the encoding.  Or you might
want to do the decode using whatever the default encoding is for that
server.

The Linux 'file' utility thinks this string is in ISO-8859, so you might
want to try a decode('ISO-8859-1') as well.  (and maybe  ISO-8859-2, -3,
-4, and -5)




-- 
DaveA