UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x9a in position 12 - python-2.7

Question

I'm developing a chatbot with the chatterbot library. The chatbot is in my native language --> Slovene, which has a lot of strange characters (for example: š, č, ž). I'm using python 2.7.
When I try to train the bot, the library has trouble with the characters mentioned above. For example, when I run the following code:
chatBot.set_trainer(ListTrainer)
chatBot.train([
"Koliko imam še dopusta?",
"Letos imate še 19 dni dopusta.",
])
it throws the following error:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x9a in position 12: invalid start byte
I added the # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- line to the top of my file, I also changed the encoding of all used files via my editor (Sublime text 3) to utf-8, I changed the system default encoding with the following code:
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')
The strings are of type unicode.
When I try to get a response, with these strange characters, it works, it has no issues with them. For example, running the following code in the same execution as the above training code(when I change 'š' to 's' and 'č' to 'c', in the train strings), throws no errors:
chatBot.set_trainer(ListTrainer)
chatBot.train([
"Koliko imam se dopusta?",
"Letos imate se 19 dni dopusta.",
])
chatBot.get_response("Koliko imam še dopusta?")
I can't find a solution to this issue. Any suggestions?
Thanks loads in advance. :)
EDIT: I used from __future__ import unicode_literals, to make strings of type unicode. I also checked if they really were unicode with the method type(myString)
I would also like to paste this link.
EDIT 2: #MallikarjunaraoKosuri - s code works, but in my case, I had one more thing inside the chatbot instance intialization, which is the following:
chatBot = ChatBot(
'Test',
trainer='chatterbot.trainers.ListTrainer',
storage_adapter='chatterbot.storage.JsonFileStorageAdapter'
)
This is the cause of my error. The json storage file the chatbot creates, is created in my local encoding and not in utf-8. It seems the default storage (.sqlite3), doesn't have this issue, so for now I'll just avoid the json storage. But I am still interested in finding a solution to this error.

Answer 1

The strings from your example are not of type unicode.
Otherwise Python would not throw the UnicodeDecodeError.
This type of error says that at a certain step of program's execution Python tries to decode byte-string into unicode but for some reason fails.
In your case the reason is that:
decoding is configured by utf-8
your source file is not in utf-8 and almost certainly in cp1252:
import unicodedata
b = '\x9a'
# u = b.decode('utf-8') # UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x9a
# in position 0: invalid start byte
u = b.decode('cp1252')
print unicodedata.name(u) # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON
print u # š
So, the 0x9a byte from your cp1252 source can't be decoded with utf-8.
The best solution is to do nothing except convertation your source to utf-8.
With Sublime Text 3 you can easily do it by: File -> Reopen with Encoding -> UTF-8.
But don't forget to Ctrl+C your source code before the convertation beacuse just after that all your š, č, ž chars wil be replaced with ?.

Answer 2

Some of our friends are already suggested good part solutions, However again I would like combine all the solutions into one.
And author #gunthercox suggested some guidelines are described here http://chatterbot.readthedocs.io/en/stable/encoding.html#how-do-i-fix-python-encoding-errors
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from chatterbot import ChatBot
# Create a new chat bot named Test
chatBot = ChatBot(
'Test',
trainer='chatterbot.trainers.ListTrainer'
)
chatBot.train([
"Koliko imam še dopusta?",
"Letos imate še 19 dni dopusta.",
])
Python Terminal
>>> # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
... from chatterbot import ChatBot
>>>
>>> # Create a new chat bot named Test
... chatBot = ChatBot(
... 'Test',
... trainer='chatterbot.trainers.ListTrainer'
... )
>>>
>>> chatBot.train([
... "Koliko imam še dopusta?",
... "Letos imate še 19 dni dopusta.",
... ])
List Trainer: [####################] 100%
>>>