How to open a file that has special character ("é") on its path?

I am trying to access a file that is in a path with a special character "é" as shown below

import xarray as xr

file_path = "//business/Partage/city/Données/climate/amplitude_1950-01-01.nc"

data = xr.open_dataset(file_path)

I am getting this following error:

> [Errno 2] No such file or directory: b'\\business\Partage\city\Donn\xc3\xa9es\climate\amplitude_1950-01-01.nc'

To get Python to read the file I have tried using pathlib, or writing my path as follows: file_path.encode('utf-8').decode('latin-1'). Still getting the same error.

I am using Python 3.7 on VS Code. As I am working on a server, I cannot change any character on the path.

Try using a raw string for the path (the content of the file is not yet a problem):

file_path = r"//business/Partage/city/Données/climate/amplitude_1950-01-01.nc"

Python works with UTF-8 encoding so you can even use non standard letter characters to name your variables(no emojis in variable names unfortunately) if you want to trigger people who might read your code(I am pretty sure that's against PEP conventions so you shouldn't actually do that). Reading UTF-8 encoded text file is slightly more tricky, but that's also fine:

import io

Ž = "🤑 🤐 🤕"
print(Ž)

path = r'C:\Temp\Some file named with all my favourite characters ąčęėįšųū.txt'

with io.open(path, mode="r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    file = f.read()

print(file)

Contents of my file:

> More weird characters: ˟̋ѬԿԪْᴥᵺ█▌░▒▓■♣♥♦
>
> Let's try emojis: 😄 😍 💗 🗾 🗼 🗻
>
> Let's draw a half done progress bar with text:
>
> ██████████░░░░░░░░░░

This works for me with Sublime text editor because it uses UTF-8 by default:

You will experience issues if the script file you are trying to run is not encoded UTF-8 though. I suspect that is the issue in this case. Make sure the file you save your script in uses UTF-8.