UnicodeEncodeError ascii codec can t encode character u xe9 in position 7 ordinal not in range 128

Question

I have this code       printinfo   title     t    old vendor id     t    apple id     n        Write file     f write  printinfo     n     But I get this error when running it       f write printinfo     n   UnicodeEncodeError   ascii  codec can t encode character u  xe9  in position 7  ordinal not in range 128    It s having toruble writing out this   Identit   secr  te  Abduction   VF    Any ideas please  not sure how to fix   Cheers   UPDATE  This is the bulk of my code  so you can see what I am doing   def runLookupEdit self  event       newpath1   pathindir           errorFileOut   newpath1    REPORT csv      f   open errorFileOut   w    global old vendor id  for old vendor id in vendorIdsIn splitlines        writeErrorFile   0     from lxml import etree     parser   etree XMLParser remove blank text True    makes pretty print work      path1   os path join pathindir  old vendor id      path2   path1     itmsp      path3   os path join path2   metadata xml          Open and parse the xml file     cantFindError   0     try          with open path3   pass     except IOError          cantFindError   1         errorMessage   old vendor id         self Error errorMessage          break     tree   etree parse path3  parser      root   tree getroot        for element in tree xpath    video title            title   element text         while   n  in title              title  title replace   n                while   t  in title              title   title replace   t                while      in title              title   title replace                    title   title strip           element text   title     print title                                                     REMOVE UNWANTED TAGS                                                           Remove the comment tags     comments   tree xpath    comment         q   1     for c in comments          p   c getparent           if q    3              apple id   c text         p remove c          q   q 1      apple id   apple id split     1  1      apple id   apple id strip       printinfo   title     t    old vendor id     t    apple id        Write file       f write  printinfo     n       f write printinfo encode  utf8       n   f close

User · Answer

You need to encode Unicode explicitly before writing to a file, otherwise Python does it for you with the default ASCII codec.

Pick an encoding and stick with it:

f.write(printinfo.encode('utf8') + '\n')

or use io.open() to create a file object that'll encode for you as you write to the file:

import io

f = io.open(filename, 'w', encoding='utf8')

You may want to read:

The Python Unicode HOWTO
Pragmatic Unicode by Ned Batchelder
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky

before continuing.

[python] UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 7: ordinal not in range(128)

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