Read txt file into python

January 25, 2022

I have german wordlist which contain special charachters like ä,ö,ü. and a word e.g. like "Nährstoffe". But when i read the text file and create a dict from it i get a wrong word out of it.

Here is my code in python3:

import random
import csv
import os
permanettxtfile='wortliste.txt'
newlines = open(permanettxtfile, "r")
lines=newlines.read().split('\n')
random.shuffle(lines)

linkdict=dict.fromkeys(lines)
print(linkdict)

I get as output:

'NÃ¤hrstoffe': None

But i want:

'Nährstoffe': None

How can i solve this issue? Is this an UTF-8 issue?

>Solution :

Try opening file in utf-8 encoding:

import random
import csv
import os

permanettxtfile='wortliste.txt'

with open(permanettxtfile, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as file:
    lines = file.read().split('\n')
    random.shuffle(lines)

linkdict = dict.fromkeys(lines)
print(linkdict)

Also don’t forget to close it with context manager as in my example or with newlines.close() for your example