UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character

Question

What could be causing this error when I try to insert a foreign character into the database?

>>UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u201c' in position 0: ordinal not in range(256)

And how do I resolve it?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I ran into this same issue when using the Python MySQLdb module. Since MySQL will let you store just about any binary data you want in a text field regardless of character set, I found my solution here:

Using UTF8 with Python MySQLdb

Edit: Quote from the above URL to satisfy the request in the first comment...

"UnicodeEncodeError:'latin-1' codec can't encode character ..."

This is because MySQLdb normally tries to encode everythin to latin-1. This can be fixed by executing the following commands right after you've etablished the connection:

db.set_character_set('utf8')
dbc.execute('SET NAMES utf8;')
dbc.execute('SET CHARACTER SET utf8;')
dbc.execute('SET character_set_connection=utf8;')

"db" is the result of MySQLdb.connect(), and "dbc" is the result of db.cursor().

Answer 2

Character U+201C Left Double Quotation Mark is not present in the Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) encoding.

It is present in code page 1252 (Western European). This is a Windows-specific encoding that is based on ISO-8859-1 but which puts extra characters into the range 0x80-0x9F. Code page 1252 is often confused with ISO-8859-1, and it's an annoying but now-standard web browser behaviour that if you serve your pages as ISO-8859-1, the browser will treat them as cp1252 instead. However, they really are two distinct encodings:

>>> u'He said \u201CHello\u201D'.encode('iso-8859-1')
UnicodeEncodeError
>>> u'He said \u201CHello\u201D'.encode('cp1252')
'He said \x93Hello\x94'

If you are using your database only as a byte store, you can use cp1252 to encode “ and other characters present in the Windows Western code page. But still other Unicode characters which are not present in cp1252 will cause errors.

You can use encode(..., 'ignore') to suppress the errors by getting rid of the characters, but really in this century you should be using UTF-8 in both your database and your pages. This encoding allows any character to be used. You should also ideally tell MySQL you are using UTF-8 strings (by setting the database connection and the collation on string columns), so it can get case-insensitive comparison and sorting right.

Answer 3

The best solution is

1. set mysql's charset to 'utf-8'

2. do like this comment(add use_unicode=True and charset="utf8")

   db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost", user = "root", passwd = "", db = "testdb", use_unicode=True, charset="utf8") – KyungHoon Kim Mar 13 '14 at 17:04

detail see :

class Connection(_mysql.connection):

    """MySQL Database Connection Object"""

    default_cursor = cursors.Cursor

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        """

        Create a connection to the database. It is strongly recommended
        that you only use keyword parameters. Consult the MySQL C API
        documentation for more information.

        host
          string, host to connect

        user
          string, user to connect as

        passwd
          string, password to use

        db
          string, database to use

        port
          integer, TCP/IP port to connect to

        unix_socket
          string, location of unix_socket to use

        conv
          conversion dictionary, see MySQLdb.converters

        connect_timeout
          number of seconds to wait before the connection attempt
          fails.

        compress
          if set, compression is enabled

        named_pipe
          if set, a named pipe is used to connect (Windows only)

        init_command
          command which is run once the connection is created

        read_default_file
          file from which default client values are read

        read_default_group
          configuration group to use from the default file

        cursorclass
          class object, used to create cursors (keyword only)

        use_unicode
          If True, text-like columns are returned as unicode objects
          using the connection's character set.  Otherwise, text-like
          columns are returned as strings.  columns are returned as
          normal strings. Unicode objects will always be encoded to
          the connection's character set regardless of this setting.

        charset
          If supplied, the connection character set will be changed
          to this character set (MySQL-4.1 and newer). This implies
          use_unicode=True.

        sql_mode
          If supplied, the session SQL mode will be changed to this
          setting (MySQL-4.1 and newer). For more details and legal
          values, see the MySQL documentation.

        client_flag
          integer, flags to use or 0
          (see MySQL docs or constants/CLIENTS.py)

        ssl
          dictionary or mapping, contains SSL connection parameters;
          see the MySQL documentation for more details
          (mysql_ssl_set()).  If this is set, and the client does not
          support SSL, NotSupportedError will be raised.

        local_infile
          integer, non-zero enables LOAD LOCAL INFILE; zero disables

        autocommit
          If False (default), autocommit is disabled.
          If True, autocommit is enabled.
          If None, autocommit isn't set and server default is used.

        There are a number of undocumented, non-standard methods. See the
        documentation for the MySQL C API for some hints on what they do.

        """