[Tutor] parse text file

[Kent Johnson]

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Norman Khine <norman at khine.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 1:27 PM, Kent Johnson <kent37 at tds.net> wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 4:16 AM, Norman Khine <norman at khine.net> wrote:
>>
>>> here are the changes:
>>>
>>> import re
>>> file=open('producers_google_map_code.txt', 'r')
>>> data =  repr( file.read().decode('utf-8') )
>>
>> Why do you use repr() here?
>
> i have latin-1 chars in the producers_google_map_code.txt' file and
> this is the only way to get it to read the data.
>
> is this incorrect?

Well, the repr() call is after the file read. If your data is latin-1
you should decode it as latin-1, not utf-8:
data = file.read().decode('latin-1')

Though if the decode('utf-8') succeeds, and you do have non-ascii
characters in the data, they are probably encoded in utf-8, not
latin-1. Are you sure you have latin-1?

The repr() call converts back to ascii text, maybe that is what you want?

Perhaps you put in the repr because you were having trouble printing?

It smells of programming by guess rather than a correct solution to
some problem. What happens if you take it out?

Kent