UnicodeEncodeError -- utf8 and unicode() not working

Question

I have a synopsis as follows:

synopsis = 'Eine Geschichte, wie im normalen Leben... Der als äußerst vorsichtig 
            geltende Risikoanalytiker Ruben verlässt seine Frau,...'

I am trying to write this to a file, but keep running into:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4' in position 705: ordinal not in range(128)

Here is what I've tried:

synopsis = unicode(synopsis)
new_file.write('%s' % synopsis)

synopsis = synopsis.encode('utf-8')
new_file.write('%s' % synopsis)

In addition, I have # # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- specified at the top of my file.

Why is this occurring and how can I fix it?

you should use codecs.open() to write unicode text and use u'' for strings or 'text'.decode('utf-8') — sherpya
– sherpya, Commented Aug 10, 2012 at 23:13
yes sorry, try a = u'mytext' or 'mytextutf8'.decode('utf-8'), this gives you an unicode string, you can write an unicode string using codecs.open('dest', 'w', 'utf-8').write(myunicodestring) — sherpya
– sherpya, Commented Aug 10, 2012 at 23:16

ephemient · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-10 23:21:05Z

1

How are you opening new_file?

import codecs
new_file = codecs.open('out', mode='w', encoding='utf-8')

This should allow you to write Unicode strings to the file, which will be encoded as UTF-8.

(Unless otherwise set, sys.getdefaultencoding() is 'ascii', which affects the encoding of newly-opened files.)

answered Aug 10, 2012 at 23:21

ephemient

207k39 gold badges292 silver badges402 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

UnicodeEncodeError -- utf8 and unicode() not working

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related