Pickle - cPickle.UnpicklingError: invalid load key, '?'

Question

I was trying to load data by using this repository (uses some Python 2 originally):
https://github.com/hashbangCoder/Text-Summarization

However I got an pickling error (using Python 2.7, I tried also Python2.6 with the same result):

>>> import cPickle as pickle
>>> pickle.load(open('train.bin', 'rb'))

Error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
cPickle.UnpicklingError: invalid load key, '?'.

I tried also with Python3 but without success (same for _pickle):

import pickle
pickle.load(open(path, 'rb'))

Error:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnpicklingError                           Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-9-0129e43fa781> in <module>()
----> 1 data = pickle.load(open(path, 'rb'), encoding='utf8')

UnpicklingError: invalid load key, '\xd9'.

There are plenty of questions out there dealing with this error, but I haven't found anything that solves my problem.

I tried also on different systems and downloaded it twice to be sure that the file wasn't corrupted during the download. I'm also getting similar errors for the other files.
So I guess it may be some kind of version or encoding problem here?

Any idea what I can try to load the file?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I recently had this issue when trying to unpickle a file... try using joblib instead:

fname = 'Path_to_filename.pkl'
model = joblib.load(open(fname, 'rb'))

Otherwise - it is likely a corrupted file.