UnicodeEncodeError: 'mbcs' codec can't encode characters in position 0--1: invalid character upon running a PyInstaller-compiled script

Question

I've just finished a program I've been working on and have been wanting to compile it to a single .exe file for distribution. I decided to use pyinstaller 3 as it has worked for me before however upon successfully compiling my file I get the following message upon running the program.

C:\Users\Luke\Documents\program\dist>viewbot.exe
_ctypes
C:\Users\Luke\AppData\Local\Temp\_MEI59042\_ctypes.pyd
_tkinter
C:\Users\Luke\AppData\Local\Temp\_MEI59042\_tkinter.pyd
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 7, in <module>
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1565, in _find_and_load
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1532, in _find_and_load_unlocked
  File "C:\Users\Luke\Documents\program\PyInstaller\loader\pyi_importers.py", line 302, in load_module
  File "C:\Python33\lib\tkinter\__init__.py", line 40, in <module>
    import _tkinter # If this fails your Python may not be configured for Tk
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1565, in _find_and_load
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1532, in _find_and_load_unlocked
  File "C:\Users\Luke\Documents\program\PyInstaller\loader\pyi_importers.py", line 474, in load_module
UnicodeEncodeError: 'mbcs' codec can't encode characters in position 0--1: invalid character

If it helps, this is a minimal code example of my program:

import os
import subprocess
from subprocess import call
import time
import tkinter
from tkinter import filedialog
call("color a", shell=True)
root = tkinter.Tk()
root.withdraw()
print ("Please locate your firefox browser)")
path = filedialog.askopenfilename(parent=root,title="Please locate your firefox browser")
path = path + " {0}"
FNULL = open(os.devnull, 'w')
viewed = 0
url = "http://google.com"
refresh = 15
views = 5
call("cls", shell=True)
for i in range(views):
    proc = subprocess.Popen(path.format(url))
    time.sleep(refresh)
    viewed = viewed + 1
    print ("Viewed", viewed, "time")
    proc.terminate()
    call("cls", shell=True)
print ("Viewing finished in", refresh * views, "seconds")
time.sleep(5)

Not quite sure what to do here so any help would be much appreciated :)

Solution 1

I had the same error message. I fixed it by replacing \ by \\ in the string containing the path of the file to open.

Solution 2

I think another elegent way is to combine the pd.read_csv with the open function. For instance, if I have a csv file called Ürümqi Diwopu International Airport.csv, I could use the following code:

import pandas as pd

dataframe = pd.read_csv(open(os.path.join(datapath, "Ürümqi Diwopu International Airport.csv"), 'r', encoding='utf-8'), index_col=0)

Hope this could help~

Comments

[Luke25361]

Hi, thanks for the reply! What do you mean by the string containing the path to the file to import?

[Pierre Carbonnelle]

I had the same error as yours, but in a different use case without pyinstaller. I was trying to import a csv file into pandas. Initially, I thought that the problem was in the csv file, but eventually I found out that it was in the path of the file. Using \\ fixed it. Not sure how it applies in your case.

[Gorkem]

Thanks, this solved my issue too for Turkish.. Setting encoding in pandas.read_csv has no effect in filename it does effect file contents only. Example filename : "SomeTurkish_ParçaŞĞİL\dataset_csv.csv" .