TOC

• Problem Statement
• Solution
• A Tip on How to Search for Errors
• Bonus - autoreload
• Outro

Problem Statement

When you finish working on a Jupyter Notebook (.ipynb) file, sometimes, it might not be saved in a correct state, so when you later open the file, you see an error which states "Unable to open x.ipynb. Bad control character in string literal in JSON at position y (line w column z)":

Solution

Solution (taken from this SO answer):

Open the file by clicking on the Open in Text Editor option shown in the screenshot above.

Then see which lines are causing syntax errors:

Then, make sure these lines end with \n:

As you can notice by the highlighted lines in yellow, I had duplicated the line ipython = get_ipython()\n in the wrong place, which was the cause of the error.

A Tip on How to Search for Errors

Initially, I searched for the error like this:

As you can see, the initial results weren't helpful. Moreover, when I asked ChatGPT 3.5 on this error (with minimal prompt engineering), it gave me this result, which wasn't very useful for my case:

However, when I modified my search term to be like this:

It gave me the SO post that solved my issue!

TLDR; knowing small search tricks can save you some time :].

Bonus - autoreload

If you're curious about the context of the code in the screenshots above, check this file :].

Outro

Hit me up if you have any questions ^^ 🙌:
LinkedIn
GitHub
Gmail: ashicsresources@gmail.com

But for now...