UnicodeDecodeError ascii codec can t decode byte 0xc2

Question

I am creating XML file in Python and there s a field on my XML that I put the contents of a text file  I do it by  f   open   myText txt   r   data   f read   f close    root   ET Element  add   doc   ET SubElement root   doc    field   ET SubElement doc   field   field set  name    text   field text   data  tree   ET ElementTree root  tree write  output xml     And then I get the UnicodeDecodeError  I already tried to put the special comment   - - coding  utf-8 - - on top of my script but still got the error  Also I tried already to enforce the encoding of my variable data encode  utf-8   but still got the error  I know this issue is very common but all the solutions I got from other questions didn t work for me   UPDATE  Traceback  Using only the special comment on the first line of the script  Traceback  most recent call last     File  D  Python lse createxml py   line 151  in  lt module gt      tree write  D   python  lse  xmls      items ctr  0      xml     File  C  Python27 lib xml etree ElementTree py   line 820  in write     serialize write  self  root  encoding  qnames  namespaces    File  C  Python27 lib xml etree ElementTree py   line 939  in  serialize xml      serialize xml write  e  encoding  qnames  None    File  C  Python27 lib xml etree ElementTree py   line 939  in  serialize xml      serialize xml write  e  encoding  qnames  None    File  C  Python27 lib xml etree ElementTree py   line 937  in  serialize xml     write  escape cdata text  encoding     File  C  Python27 lib xml etree ElementTree py   line 1073  in  escape cdata     return text encode encoding   xmlcharrefreplace   UnicodeDecodeError   ascii  codec can t decode byte 0xc2 in position 243  ordina l not in range 128    Traceback  Using  encode  utf-8    Traceback  most recent call last     File  D  Python lse createxml py   line 148  in  lt module gt      field text   data encode  utf-8   UnicodeDecodeError   ascii  codec can t decode byte 0xc2 in position 227  ordina l not in range 128    I used  decode  utf-8   and the error message didn t appear and it successfully created my XML file  But the problem is that the XML is not viewable on my browser

User · Answer

usr bin python    encoding utf8  Try This to starting of python file

User · Answer

Python 2  The error is caused because ElementTree did not expect to find non-ASCII strings set the XML when trying to write it out  You should use Unicode strings for non-ASCII instead  Unicode strings can be made either by using the u prefix on strings  i e  u      or by decoding a string with mystr decode  utf-8   using the appropriate encoding   The best practice is to decode all text data as it s read  rather than decoding mid-program  The io module provides an open   method which decodes text data to Unicode strings as it s read   ElementTree will be much happier with Unicodes and will properly encode it correctly when using the ET write   method   Also  for best compatibility and readability  ensure that ET encodes to UTF-8 during write   and adds the relevant header   Presuming your input file is UTF-8 encoded  0xC2 is common UTF-8 lead byte   putting everything together  and using the with statement  your code should look like   with io open  myText txt    r   encoding  utf-8   as f      data   f read    root   ET Element  add   doc   ET SubElement root   doc    field   ET SubElement doc   field   field set  name    text   field text   data  tree   ET ElementTree root  tree write  output xml   encoding  utf-8   xml declaration True    Output    lt  xml version  1 0  encoding  utf-8   gt   lt add gt  lt doc gt  lt field name  text  gt data    lt  field gt  lt  doc gt  lt  add gt

User · Answer

I was running into a similar error in pywikipediabot  The  decode method is a step in the right direction but for me it didn t work without adding  ignore    ignore encoding   lambda s  s decode  utf8    ignore        Ignoring encoding errors can lead to data loss or produce incorrect output  But if you just want to get it done and the details aren t very important this can be a good way to move faster

User · Answer

You need to decode data from input string into unicode  before using it  to avoid encoding problems   field text   data decode  utf8

[python] UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2

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