handling encoding and decoding errors in python john lekberg

okay, here's a comprehensive tutorial on handling encoding and decoding errors in python, covering the concepts, common problems, error handling strategies, and practical code examples.

**encoding and decoding errors in python: a comprehensive guide**

**introduction**

python, like many modern programming languages, uses unicode to represent text. unicode provides a unique number (code point) for every character, symbol, and glyph across different languages and scripts. however, when you interact with files, networks, or external data sources, you often need to convert between unicode and specific byte representations (encodings). this process can lead to errors when the encoding doesn't correctly represent the data, resulting in encoding and decoding errors.

**key concepts**

1. **unicode:** a standard for encoding text characters. each character is assigned a unique code point. python 3 uses unicode internally.

2. **encoding:** the process of converting unicode text (python strings) into a sequence of bytes. examples include utf-8, ascii, latin-1 (iso-8859-1), utf-16.

3. **decoding:** the process of converting a sequence of bytes into unicode text (python strings).

4. **encoding errors:** occur when you try to encode unicode text into a specific encoding that cannot represent all the characters in that text.

5. **decoding errors:** occur when you try to decode a sequence of bytes into unicode text using the wrong encoding, or when the byte sequence contains invalid byte patterns for the specified encoding.

**common encodings**

* **utf-8:** the most common encoding for the web and general text files. it is a variable-width encoding that can represent all unicode characters. it is backward compatible with ascii.

* **ascii:** a 7-bit encoding that represents 128 characters (english letters, numbers, punctuation). it is a subset of utf-8.

* **latin-1 (iso-8859-1):** an 8-bit encoding that represents 256 characters, including many european ch ...

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