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

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 9 May 2015 08:31 pm, zljubisicmob at gmail.com wrote:

> It works, but if you change title = title[:232] to title = title[:233],
> you will get "FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory".


Which is a *completely different* error from 

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


> As you can see ROOTDIR contains \U.

How can I possibly see that? Your code reads ROOTDIR from the config file,
which you don't show us.

I agree with you that Windows has limitations on the length of file names,
and that you get an error if you give a file name that cannot be found. The
point is that before you can get that far, you *first* have to fix the
SyntaxError. That's a completely different problem.

You can't fix the \U syntax error by truncating the total file length. But
you can fix that syntax error by changing your code so it reads the ROOTDIR
from a config file instead of a hard-coded string literal -- exactly like
we told you to do!

An essential skill when programming is to read and understand the error
messages. One of the most painful things to use is a programming language
that just says 

"An error occurred"

with no other explanation. Python gives you lots of detail to explain what
went wrong:

SyntaxError means you made an error in the syntax of the code and the
program cannot even run.

FileNotFoundError means that the program did run, it tried to open a file,
but the file doesn't exist.

They're a little bit different, don't you agree?



-- 
Steven