Write xml utf-8 file with utf-8 data with ElementTree ... again

Question

The title of this question is the same as this one, but my problem is different.

I have data read from a tar.gz archive using tarfile.TarFile.extractfile() and stored in an xml.etree.ElementTree.Element. The data is utf-8 encoded.

When I attempt to use xml.etree.ElementTree.ElementTree.write() to put it in a file, I get this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "../python/GetDoc.py", line 150, in <module>
    ET.ElementTree(elements).write(args.outfile, encoding="us-ascii", method="text")
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 815, in write
    _serialize_text(write, self._root, encoding)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1007, in _serialize_text
    write(part.encode(encoding))
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 10: ordinal not in range(128)

How are you reading the data from the file? Are you properly decoding it from UTF-8 to unicode objects? — BrenBarn
– BrenBarn, Commented Jul 18, 2012 at 2:26
That was quick! Indeed that seems to have been the problem. I had thought naively that ElementTree would be able to deal with UTF-8 strings. Go ahead and write an answer and I'll accept it (: — drevicko
– drevicko, Commented Jul 18, 2012 at 2:29

BrenBarn · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-18 02:36:49Z

1

How are you reading the data from the file? Are you properly decoding it from UTF-8 to unicode objects? ElementTree will want unicode objects, not bytestrings encoded in UTF-8.

answered Jul 18, 2012 at 2:36

BrenBarn

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drevicko · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-18 02:26:44Z

0

I was able to solve this by converting my strings to unicode using myString.decode('utf-8') before adding them to my ElementTree.Element object. It seems ET.ElementTree.write() is not happy with other string encodings.

answered Jul 18, 2012 at 2:26

drevicko

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