UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 13: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

The file is being read as a bunch of strs, but it should be unicodes. Python tries to implicitly convert, but fails. Change:

job_titles = [line.strip() for line in title_file.readlines()]

to explicitly decode the strs to unicode (here assuming UTF-8):

job_titles = [line.decode('utf-8').strip() for line in title_file.readlines()]

It could also be solved by importing the codecs module and using codecs.open rather than the built-in open.

This works fine for me.

f = open(file_path, 'r+', encoding="utf-8")

You can add a third parameter encoding to ensure the encoding type is 'utf-8'

Note: this method works fine in Python3, I did not try it in Python2.7.

For me there was a problem with the terminal encoding. Adding UTF-8 to .bashrc solved the problem:

export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

Don't forget to reload .bashrc afterwards:

source ~/.bashrc

You can try this also:

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')