QXmlStreamReader raises UnicodeEncodeError

Question

A piece of code that works with Python 2 does not work with Python 3 on my system.

f = open("plotwidget.svg")
svgData = f.read()
xml_stream = QtCore.QXmlStreamReader(svgData)

This raises the following error:

UnicodeEncodeError 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u2212' in position 12688: ordinal not in range(256)

The character is indeed not an ASCII character, but I don't understand why QXmlStreamReader expects to find a latin-1 encoding when the file seems to be a proper UTF-8 file with the encoding specified in the header.

The SVG file was generated with matplotlib (figure.savefig(...)).

Answer 1

The problem is caused because the constructor requires bytes and not strings, the solution is to use encode().

xml_stream = QtCore.QXmlStreamReader(svgData.encode())