string encoding and decoding?

Question

Here are my attempts with error messages. What am I doing wrong?

string.decode("ascii", "ignore") 

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 37: ordinal not in range(128)

string.encode('utf-8', "ignore") 

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 37: ordinal not in range(128)

Answer 1

You can't decode a unicode, and you can't encode a str. Try doing it the other way around.

Answer 2

Guessing at all the things omitted from the original question, but, assuming Python 2.x the key is to read the error messages carefully: in particular where you call 'encode' but the message says 'decode' and vice versa, but also the types of the values included in the messages.

In the first example string is of type unicode and you attempted to decode it which is an operation converting a byte string to unicode. Python helpfully attempted to convert the unicode value to str using the default 'ascii' encoding but since your string contained a non-ascii character you got the error which says that Python was unable to encode a unicode value. Here's an example which shows the type of the input string:

>>> u"\xa0".decode("ascii", "ignore")  Traceback (most recent call last):   File "<pyshell#7>", line 1, in <module>     u"\xa0".decode("ascii", "ignore") UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128) 

In the second case you do the reverse attempting to encode a byte string. Encoding is an operation that converts unicode to a byte string so Python helpfully attempts to convert your byte string to unicode first and, since you didn't give it an ascii string the default ascii decoder fails:

>>> "\xc2".encode("ascii", "ignore")  Traceback (most recent call last):   File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>     "\xc2".encode("ascii", "ignore") UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)