Why do I get a SyntaxError for a Unicode escape in my file path? [duplicate]

Question

The folder I want to get to is called python and is on my desktop.

I get the following error when I try to get to it

>>> os.chdir('C:\Users\expoperialed\Desktop\Python')
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

Answer 1

You need to use a raw string, double your slashes or use forward slashes instead:

r'C:\Users\expoperialed\Desktop\Python'
'C:\\Users\\expoperialed\\Desktop\\Python'
'C:/Users/expoperialed/Desktop/Python'

In regular Python strings, the \U character combination signals an extended Unicode codepoint escape.

You can hit any number of other issues, for any of the other recognised escape sequences, such as \a, \t, or \x.

Note that as of Python 3.6, unrecognized escape sequences can trigger a DeprecationWarning (you'll have to remove the default filter for those), and in a future version of Python, such unrecognised escape sequences will cause a SyntaxError. No specific version has been set at this time, but Python will first use SyntaxWarning in the version before it'll be an error.

If you want to find issues like these in Python versions 3.6 and up, you can turn the warning into a SyntaxError exception by using the warnings filter error:^invalid escape sequence .*:DeprecationWarning (via a command line switch, environment variable or function call):

Python 3.10.0 (default, Oct 15 2021, 22:25:32) [Clang 13.0.0 (clang-1300.0.29.3)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import warnings
>>> '\expoperialed'
'\\expoperialed'
>>> warnings.filterwarnings('default', '^invalid escape sequence .*', DeprecationWarning)
>>> '\expoperialed'
<stdin>:1: DeprecationWarning: invalid escape sequence '\e'
'\\expoperialed'
>>> warnings.filterwarnings('error', '^invalid escape sequence .*', DeprecationWarning)
>>> '\expoperialed'
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    '\expoperialed'
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
SyntaxError: invalid escape sequence '\e'

Answer 2

This usually happens in Python 3. One of the common reasons would be that while specifying your file path you need "\\" instead of "\". As in:

filePath = "C:\\User\\Desktop\\myFile"

For Python 2, just using "\" would work.

Answer 3

f = open('C:\\Users\\Pooja\\Desktop\\trolldata.csv')

Use '\\' for python program in Python version 3 and above.. Error will be resolved..

Answer 4

All the three syntax work very well.

Another way is to first write

path = r'C:\user\...................' (whatever is the path for you)

and then passing it to os.chdir(path)

Answer 5

I had the same error. Basically, I suspect that the path cannot start either with "U" or "User" after "C:\". I changed my directory to "c:\file_name.png" by putting the file that I want to access from python right under the 'c:\' path.

In your case, if you have to access the "python" folder, perhaps reinstall the python, and change the installation path to something like "c:\python". Otherwise, just avoid the "...\User..." in your path, and put your project under C:.