windows 10 :pytesseract.pytesseract.TesseractError: (1, 'Error opening data file \\Program Files (x86)\\Tesseract-OCR\\tessdata/chi_sim.traineddata')

I am using pytesseract on windows 10 x64, and the python is 3.5.2 x64, Tesseract is 4.0 ,the code is as follow:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

try:
    import Image
except ImportError:
    from PIL import Image
import pytesseract


print(pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open('d:/testimages/name.gif'), lang='chi_sim'))

error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:/test.py", line 10, in <module>
    print(pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open('d:/testimages/name.gif'), lang='chi_sim'))
  File "C:\Users\dell\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python35\lib\site-packages\pytesseract\pytesseract.py", line 165, in image_to_string
    raise TesseractError(status, errors)
pytesseract.pytesseract.TesseractError: (1, 'Error opening data file \\Program Files (x86)\\Tesseract-OCR\\tessdata/chi_sim.traineddata')

C:\Program Files (x86)\Tesseract-OCR\tessdata,like this:

[int3l]

@zwl1619, @coollorenzo, Finally managed to reproduce this error.

Please try to use the config option with pytesseract like this:

tessdata_dir_config = '--tessdata-dir "<replace_with_your_tessdata_dir_path>"'
# Example config: '--tessdata-dir "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Tesseract-OCR\\tessdata"'
# It's important to include double quotes around the dir path.

pytesseract.image_to_string(image, lang='chi_sim', config=tessdata_dir_config)

If this workaround works for you, I will include the snippet to the README file.

[jtbr]

This occurs under windows (at least in tesseract version 3.05) when the current directory is on a different drive from where tesseract is installed.

Something in tesseract is expecting data files to be in \Program Files… (rather than C:\Program Files, say). So if you’re not on the same drive letter as tesseract, it will fail. It would be great if we could work around it by temporarily changing drives (under windows only) to the tesseract installation drive before executing tesseract, and changing back after.