Python decoding Unicode is not supported

python encoding utf-8 character-encoding
simonbs picture simonbs · Oct 3, 2011 · Viewed 96.7k times · Source

I am having a problem with my encoding in Python. I have tried different methods but I can't seem to find the best way to encode my output to UTF-8.

This is what I am trying to do:

result = unicode(google.searchGoogle(param), "utf-8").encode("utf-8")

searchGoogle returns the first Google result for param.

This is the error I get:

exceptions.TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported

Does anyone know how I can make Python encode my output in UTF-8 to avoid this error?

Answer

yak picture yak · Oct 3, 2011

Looks like google.searchGoogle(param) already returns unicode:

>>> unicode(u'foo', 'utf-8')

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#1>", line 1, in <module>
    unicode(u'foo', 'utf-8')
TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported

So what you want is:

result = google.searchGoogle(param).encode("utf-8")

As a side note, your code expects it to return a utf-8 encoded string so what was the point in decoding it (using unicode()) and encoding back (using .encode()) using the same encoding?

Related questions

Working with UTF-8 encoding in Python source

Consider: $ cat bla.py u = unicode('d…') s = u.encode('utf-8') print s $ python bla.py File "bla.py", line 1 SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file bla.py on line 1, but no encoding declared; see http://…

Read More
How do I check if a string is unicode or ascii?

What do I have to do in Python to figure out which encoding a string has?

Read More
Changing default encoding of Python?

I have many "can't encode" and "can't decode" problems with Python when I run my applications from the console. But in the Eclipse PyDev IDE, the default character encoding is set to UTF-8, and I'm fine. I searched around for …

Read More