How to Handle the Byte Order Mark (BOM) Character (u'\ufeff') in Python String?

Handling u'ufeff' in Python String

While web scraping, you may encounter an error related to the character u'ufeff'. This character is known as the Byte Order Mark (BOM), which is often added to the beginning of text files to indicate the encoding of the file.

Upon opening a file in Python 3, the 'ascii' codec is used by default if no encoding is specified. However, the BOM character is not a part of the ASCII character set, leading to the "UnicodeEncodeError" exception.

To resolve this issue, the recommended approach is to specify the encoding explicitly when opening the file. The 'encoding' keyword allows you to specify the correct encoding for the file, such as 'utf-8-sig', which includes the BOM as part of the encoding. Here's an example:

f = open('file', mode='r', encoding='utf-8-sig')
read_content = f.read()

By providing the correct encoding, the BOM character will be omitted from the read result, allowing you to work with the text as intended. This technique is particularly useful when handling text files obtained from web scraping or other sources where the encoding may not be explicitly stated.

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