"Unicode Error "unicodeescape" codec can't decode bytes... Cannot open text files in Python 3 [duplicate]

The problem is with the string

"C:\Users\Eric\Desktop\beeline.txt"

Here, \U in "C:\Users... starts an eight-character Unicode escape, such as \U00014321. In your code, the escape is followed by the character 's', which is invalid.

You either need to duplicate all backslashes:

"C:\\Users\\Eric\\Desktop\\beeline.txt"

Or prefix the string with r (to produce a raw string):

r"C:\Users\Eric\Desktop\beeline.txt"

Typical error on Windows because the default user directory is C:\user\<your_user>, so when you want to pass this path as a string argument into a Python function, you get a Unicode error, just because the \u is a Unicode escape. If the next 8 characters after the \u are not numeric this produces an error.

To solve it, just double the backslashes: C:\\user\\<\your_user>... This will ensure that Python treats the single backslashes as single backslashes.

Prefixing with 'r' works very well, but it needs to be in the correct syntax. For example:

passwordFile = open(r'''C:\Users\Bob\SecretPasswordFile.txt''')

No need for \\ here - maintains readability and works well.

With Python 3 I had this problem:

 self.path = 'T:\PythonScripts\Projects\Utilities'

produced this error:

 self.path = 'T:\PythonScripts\Projects\Utilities'
            ^
 SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in
 position 25-26: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

the fix that worked is:

 self.path = r'T:\PythonScripts\Projects\Utilities'

It seems the '\U' was producing an error and the 'r' preceding the string turns off the eight-character Unicode escape (for a raw string) which was failing. (This is a bit of an over-simplification, but it works if you don't care about unicode)

Hope this helps someone