Python: write a list with non-ASCII characters to a text file

Question

I'm using python 3.4 and I'm trying to write a list of names to a text file. The list is as follows:

my_list = ['Dejan Živković','Gregg Berhalter','James Stevens','Mike Windischmann',
               'Gunnar Heiðar Þorvaldsson']

I use the following code to export the list:

file = open("/Users/.../Desktop/Name_Python.txt", "w")
file.writelines( "%s\n" % item for item in my_list )
file.close()

But it does not work. Python seems not to like non-ASCII characters and gives me the following errors:

"UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u017d' in position 6: ordinal not in range(128)"

Do you know if there is a way to solve this problem ? Maybe it's possible to write files in UTF-8 / unicode ?

Answer 1

The issue is that the file is getting openned with ascii encoding (which might be what is returned by locale.getpreferredencoding() for your environment). You can try openning with the correct encoding (maybe utf-8) . Also, you should use with statement so that it handles closing the file for you.

For Python 2.x , you can use codecs.open() function instead of open() -

with codecs.open("/Users/.../Desktop/Name_Python.txt", "w",encoding='utf-8') as file:
    file.writelines( "%s\n" % item for item in my_list )

For Python 3.x , you can use the built-in function open() , which supports encoding argument. Example -

with open("/Users/.../Desktop/Name_Python.txt", "w",encoding='utf-8') as file:
    file.writelines( "%s\n" % item for item in my_list )