Searching a Unicode file using Python

Question

Setup

I'm writing a script to process and annotate build logs from Visual Studio. The build logs are HTML, and from what I can tell, Unicode (UTF-16?) as well. Here's a snippet from one of the files:

c:\\anonyfolder\\anonyfile.c(17169) : warning C4701: potentially uninitialized local variable 'object_adrs2' used
c:\\anonyfolder\\anonyfile.c(17409) : warning C4701: potentially uninitialized local variable 'pclcrd_ptr' used
c:\\anonyfolder\\anonyfile.c(17440) : warning C4701: potentially uninitialized local variable 'object_adrs2' used

The first 16 bytes of the file look like this:

feff 003c 0068 0074 006d 006c 003e 000d

The rest of the file is littered with null bytes as well.

I'd like to be able to perform string and regular expression searches/matches on these files. However, when I try the following code I get an error message.

buildLog = open(sys.argv[1]).readlines()

for line in buildLog:
    match = u'warning'
    if line.find(match) >= 0:
        print line

The error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "proclogs.py", line 60, in
if line.find(match) >= 0:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Apparently it's choking on the 0xff byte in 0xfeff at the beginning of the file. If I skip the first line, I get no matches:

buildLog = open(sys.argv[1]).readlines()

for line in buildLog[1:]: # Skip the first line.
    match = u'warning'
    if line.find(match) >= 0:
        print line

Likewise, using the non-Unicode match = 'warning' produces no results.

Question

How can I portably search a Unicode file using strings and regular expressions in Python? Additionally, how can I do so such that I can reconstruct the original file? (The goal is to be able to write annotations on the warning lines without mangling the file.)

Answer 1

Try using the codecs package:

import codecs
buildLog = codecs.open(sys.argv[1], "r", "utf-16").readlines()

Also you may run into trouble with your print statement as it may try to convert the strings to your console encoding. If you're printing for your review you could use,

print repr(line)

Answer 2

Tried this? When saving a parsing script with non-ascii characters, I had the interpreter suggest an alternate encoding to the front of the file.

Non-ASCII found, yet no encoding declared.  Add a line like:
# -*- coding: cp1252 -*-

Adding that as the first line of the script fixed the problem for me. Not sure if this is what's causing your error, though.