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Decoding and Encoding in Python

I have some text that I am trying to decode and encode in Python

import html.parser
original_tweet = "I luv my &lt;3 iphone &amp; you’re awsm 
 apple.DisplayIsAwesome, sooo happppppy 🙂 
 http://www.apple.com"
tweet = original_tweet.decode("utf8").encode('ascii', 'ignore')

I have entered the original tweet on one line in Spyder (Python 3.6)

I get the following message

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'

Is there an alternative way to rewrite this code for Python 3.6?

Answer*

In Python3+, your `original_tweet` string is a [UTF-8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8) encoded [Unicode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode) string containing a [Unicode emoji](https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html). Because the 65k+ characters in Unicode are a superset of the 256 [ASCII](http://www.asciitable.com/) characters, you can not simply convert a Unicode string into an ASCII string.

However, if you can live with some data loss (i.e. drop the emoji) then you can try the following (see [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4299675/python-script-to-convert-from-utf-8-to-ascii) or [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2365411/convert-unicode-to-ascii-without-errors-in-python) related question):

 original_tweet = "I luv my &lt;3 iphone &amp; you’re awsm ..."

 # Convert the original UTF8 encoded string into an array of bytes.
 original_tweet_bytes = original_tweet.encode("utf-8")

 # Decode that array of bytes into a string containing only ASCII characters;
 # pass errors="strict" to find failing character mappings, and I also suggest
 # to read up on the option errors="replace".
 original_tweet_ascii = original_tweet_bytes.decode("ascii", errors="ignore")

Or as a simple one-liner:

 tweet = original_tweet.encode("utf-8").decode("ascii", errors="ignore")

Note that this does _not_ convert the [HTML entities](https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref) `&lt;` and `&amp;` which you may have to address separately. You can do that using a proper HTML parser (e.g. [lxml](http://lxml.de/parsing.html#parsing-html)), or use a simple [string replacement](https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.replace):

 tweet = tweet.replace("&lt;", "<").replace("&amp;", "&")

Or as of Python 3.4+ you can use [`html.unescape()`](https://docs.python.org/3/library/html.html#html.unescape) like so:

 tweet = html.unescape(tweet)

See also [this question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2087370/decode-html-entities-in-python-string) on how to handle HTML entities in strings.

**Addendum.** The [Unidecode](https://github.com/avian2/unidecode) package for Python seems to provide useful functionality for this, too, although in its current version it does not handle emojis.

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Thank you so much for helping me with this. That truly resolves my query.

cordelia
– cordelia

2018年03月10日 10:23:21 +00:00
Commented Mar 10, 2018 at 10:23
How do I avoid losing the 're for the you're? Apologies for bugging you with this but I just noticed it.

cordelia
– cordelia

2018年03月10日 10:57:31 +00:00
Commented Mar 10, 2018 at 10:57
@cordelia, the ’ character is Unicode character U+2019 and has no direct equivalent in ASCII. What you can do, however, is to use str.replace() to replace all ‘ and ’ with ASCII ' and the double quotation marks " and " with ASCI ". See also this question: Replacing unicode punctuation with ASCII approximations.

Jens
– Jens

2018年03月10日 11:13:18 +00:00
Commented Mar 10, 2018 at 11:13
Thanks for this @Jens

cordelia
– cordelia

2018年03月10日 11:19:10 +00:00
Commented Mar 10, 2018 at 11:19

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Decoding and Encoding in Python

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