Python: How to get StringIO.writelines to accept unicode string?

Question

I'm getting a

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa3' in position 34: ordinal not in range(128)

on a string stored in 'a.desc' below as it contains the '£' character. It's stored in the underlying Google App Engine datastore as a unicode string so that's fine. The cStringIO.StringIO.writelines function is trying seemingly trying to encode it in ascii format:

result.writelines(['blahblah',a.desc,'blahblahblah'])

How do I instruct it to treat the encoding as unicode if that's the correct phrasing?

app engine runs on python 2.5

Answer 1

You can wrap the StringIO object in a codecs.StreamReaderWriter object to automatically encode and decode unicode.

Like this:

import cStringIO, codecs
buffer = cStringIO.StringIO()
codecinfo = codecs.lookup("utf8")
wrapper = codecs.StreamReaderWriter(buffer, 
        codecinfo.streamreader, codecinfo.streamwriter)

wrapper.writelines([u"list of", u"unicode strings"])

buffer will be filled with utf-8 encoded bytes.

If I understand your case correctly, you will only need to write, so you could also do:

import cStringIO, codecs
buffer = cStringIO.StringIO()
wrapper = codecs.getwriter("utf8")(buffer)