UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 7: ordinal not in range(128) [duplicate]

Question

I have this code:

    printinfo = title + "\t" + old_vendor_id + "\t" + apple_id + '\n'     # Write file     f.write (printinfo + '\n') 

But I get this error when running it:

    f.write(printinfo + '\n') UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 7: ordinal not in range(128) 

It's having toruble writing out this:

Identité secrète (Abduction) [VF] 

Any ideas please, not sure how to fix.

Cheers.

UPDATE: This is the bulk of my code, so you can see what I am doing:

def runLookupEdit(self, event):     newpath1 = pathindir + "/"     errorFileOut = newpath1 + "REPORT.csv"     f = open(errorFileOut, 'w')  global old_vendor_id  for old_vendor_id in vendorIdsIn.splitlines():     writeErrorFile = 0     from lxml import etree     parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True) # makes pretty print work      path1 = os.path.join(pathindir, old_vendor_id)     path2 = path1 + ".itmsp"     path3 = os.path.join(path2, 'metadata.xml')      # Open and parse the xml file     cantFindError = 0     try:         with open(path3): pass     except IOError:         cantFindError = 1         errorMessage = old_vendor_id         self.Error(errorMessage)         break     tree = etree.parse(path3, parser)     root = tree.getroot()      for element in tree.xpath('//video/title'):         title = element.text         while '\n' in title:             title= title.replace('\n', ' ')         while '\t' in title:             title = title.replace('\t', ' ')         while '  ' in title:             title = title.replace('  ', ' ')         title = title.strip()         element.text = title     print title  ######################################### ######## REMOVE UNWANTED TAGS ######## #########################################      # Remove the comment tags     comments = tree.xpath('//comment()')     q = 1     for c in comments:         p = c.getparent()         if q == 3:             apple_id = c.text         p.remove(c)         q = q+1      apple_id = apple_id.split(':',1)[1]     apple_id = apple_id.strip()     printinfo = title + "\t" + old_vendor_id + "\t" + apple_id      # Write file     # f.write (printinfo + '\n')     f.write(printinfo.encode('utf8') + '\n') f.close() 

Answer 1

You need to encode Unicode explicitly before writing to a file, otherwise Python does it for you with the default ASCII codec.

Pick an encoding and stick with it:

f.write(printinfo.encode('utf8') + '\n') 

or use io.open() to create a file object that'll encode for you as you write to the file:

import io  f = io.open(filename, 'w', encoding='utf8') 

You may want to read:

• The Python Unicode HOWTO

• Pragmatic Unicode by Ned Batchelder

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky

before continuing.