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

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.