Python: How do I print an unicode string from a .txt file

Question

I'm using Python 3.2.3 and idle to program a text game. I'm using a .txt file to store the map schemes that later will be opened by the program and draw at the terminal(IDLE for the moment).

What is in the .txt file is it:

╔════Π═╗
Π      ║ 
║w bb c□
║w bb c║ 
╚═□══□═╝

Π: door; □: window; b: bed; c: computer; w: wardrobe

As I'm new to programming I'm having a difficult problem doing this.

Here is the code I made so far for this:

doc =  codecs.open("D:\Escritório\Codes\maps.txt")
map = doc.read().decode('utf8')
whereIsmap = map.find('bedroom')
if buldIntel == 1 and localIntel == 1:
    whereIsmap = text.find('map1:')
    itsGlobal = 1
if espLocation == "localIntel" == 1:
    whereIsmap = text.find('map0:')
if buldIntel == 0 and localIntel == 0:
    doc.close()

for line in whereIsmap:
    (map) = line
    mapa.append(str(map))
doc.close()

if itsGlobal == 1:
    print(mapa[0])
    print(mapa[1])
    print(mapa[2])
    print(mapa[3])
    print(mapa[4])
    print(mapa[5])
    print(mapa[6])
    print(mapa[7])

if itsLocal == 1 and itsGlobal == 0:
    print(mapa[0])
    print(mapa[1])
    print(mapa[2])
    print(mapa[3])
    print(mapa[4])

There are two maps and each one of them has a title the smaller one is map1(the one I've show).

Python is giving this error message if I try to run the program:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python32\projetoo", line 154, in <module>
    gamePlay(ask1, type, selfIntel1, localIntel, buildIntel, whereAmI, HP, time, itsLocal, itsBuild)
  File "C:\Python32\projetoo", line 72, in gamePlay
    map = doc.read().decode('utf8')
  File "C:\Python32\lib\encodings\utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
    return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

What do I do to print to the IDLE terminal the maps exactly as I showed up there?

Answer 1

The issue is that you are using codecs.open without specifying an encoding, then trying to decode the string returned by doc.read(), even though it is already a Unicode string.

To fix this, specify an encoding in your call to codecs.open: codecs.open("...", encoding="utf-8"), then you won't need the call to .decode('utf-8') later.

Also, since you're using Python 3, you can just use open:

doc = open("...", encoding="utf-8").read()

Finally, you'll need to re-encode the unicode string when you print it:

print("\n".join(mapa[0:4]).encode("utf-8"))