Weird files in a File Geodatabase (FGDB) that crash custom python script

RandyKreuziger1

We have GIS data in users folders going back  a couple of decades.  I've been running a custom python script that inventories all files and identifies gis file types.  It sort of works, but is crashing on a handful of old file geodatabases from 2009 that contain a bunch of weird files I've never seen before.  File geodatabases containing these weird files  can still  be opened and used in ArcMap and Pro, but not the custom python inventory script written by the consultant.

This script has already inventoried 100,000's files with 10,000's shape, gdb and mdb geodatabases.  I can't post the code, but has anyone seen files like these before under the .gdb folder?  If I delete them with file explorer the script continues until the next .gdb folder containing them.

These are the files

agfl_Irrig_20081016.GÉìt¦¦Oè¿t¦+n++

agfl_IrrigCP_20081016.GÉìt¦¦Oè¿t¦+n++

agfl_IrrigFld_20080926.GÉìt¦¦Oè¿t¦+n++

agfl_IrrigFld_20081016.GÉìt¦¦Oè¿t¦+n++

_gdb.GÉìt¦¦Oè¿t¦+n++

 

Here's the python error

  File "C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Pro\bin\Python\envs\arcgispro-py3\Lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 15, in decode

    return codecs.charmap_decode(input,errors,decoding_table)

UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x90 in position 16413: character maps to <undefined>

Weird Files in FGDB.png

DanPatterson

cp1252 encoding  .... was the name of the script?

this rings a bell and a quick search on the web brought this up a number of issues below(amongst many threads).  The python solutions was to try to read the file/filenames using the suspected encoding used during that time rather than relying on utf-8

 

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CP-1252 (or Windows-1252) is a single-byte 8-bit character encoding used by default in older Microsoft Windows systems for English and Western European languages. It extends standard ASCII and adds common symbols like the Euro sign and smart

Reading a CP-1252 file as UTF-8 (or vice versa) causes special characters like apostrophes or accented letters to turn into strange multi-character symbols (e.g., — instead of an em-dash).