Python Pandas to_clipboard() UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character

Question

I want to pass dataframe data to my clipboard so I can paste into Excel. Problem is, the character '\xe9' is causing an encoding issue, like so:

>>> df.to_clipboard()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\pandas\util\clipboard.py", line 65, in winSetClipboard
    hCd = ctypes.windll.kernel32.GlobalAlloc(GMEM_DDESHARE, len(bytes(text))+1)
TypeError: string argument without an encoding

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#51>", line 1, in <module>
    df.to_clipboard()
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\pandas\core\generic.py", line 1028, in to_clipboard
    clipboard.to_clipboard(self, excel=excel, sep=sep, **kwargs)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\clipboard.py", line 98, in to_clipboard
    clipboard_set(objstr)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\pandas\util\clipboard.py", line 68, in winSetClipboard
    hCd = ctypes.windll.kernel32.GlobalAlloc(GMEM_DDESHARE, len(bytes(text, 'ascii'))+1)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xe9' in position 543793: ordinal not in range(128)

I decoded the character and it's an accent é

>>> '\xe9'.encode().decode()
'é'

After reading the documentation for to_clipboard(), I noticed it says: other keywords are passed to to_csv. OK, so by 'other keywords', I assume that means keyword arguments from to_csv() -- specifically I want to use encoding='cp1252'.

When I try this, to_clipboard() doesn't recognize the encoding keyword:

df.to_clipboard(encoding='cp1252')
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\pandas\core\generic.py", line 1028, in to_clipboard
    clipboard.to_clipboard(self, excel=excel, sep=sep, **kwargs)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\clipboard.py", line 95, in to_clipboard
    objstr = obj.to_string(**kwargs)
TypeError: to_string() got an unexpected keyword argument 'encoding'

Is there a way to pass all data to the clipboard (both ascii and non-ascii)?

Answer 1

df.to_clipboard(df.to_csv(encoding='cp1252'))

just encode it as a csv with the encoding specified then throw it on the clipboard.