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Python | UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u0119' in position 1: character maps to <undefined> [duplicate]

I'm trying to scrape a website, but it gives me an error.
I'm using the following code:
import urllib.request
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
get = urllib.request.urlopen("https://www.website.com/")
html = get.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
print(soup)
And I'm getting the following error:
File "C:\Python34\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 19, in encode
return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_table)[0]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters in position 70924-70950: character maps to <undefined>
What can I do to fix this?

I was getting the same UnicodeEncodeError when saving scraped web content to a file. To fix it I replaced this code:
with open(fname, "w") as f:
f.write(html)
with this:
with open(fname, "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
f.write(html)
If you need to support Python 2, then use this:
import io
with io.open(fname, "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
f.write(html)
If you want to use a different encoding than UTF-8, specify whatever your actual encoding is for encoding.

I fixed it by adding .encode("utf-8") to soup.
That means that print(soup) becomes print(soup.encode("utf-8")).

In Python 3.7, and running Windows 10 this worked (I am not sure whether it will work on other platforms and/or other versions of Python)
Replacing this line:
with open('filename', 'w') as f:
With this:
with open('filename', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
The reason why it is working is because the encoding is changed to UTF-8 when using the file, so characters in UTF-8 are able to be converted to text, instead of returning an error when it encounters a UTF-8 character that is not suppord by the current encoding.

set PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8
set PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSSTDIO=utf-8
You may or may not need to set that second environment variable PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSSTDIO.
Alternatively, this can be done in code (although it seems that doing it through env vars is recommended):
sys.stdin.reconfigure(encoding='utf-8')
sys.stdout.reconfigure(encoding='utf-8')
Additionally: Reproducing this error was a bit of a pain, so leaving this here too in case you need to reproduce it on your machine:
set PYTHONIOENCODING=windows-1252
set PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSSTDIO=windows-1252

While saving the response of get request, same error was thrown on Python 3.7 on window 10. The response received from the URL, encoding was UTF-8 so it is always recommended to check the encoding so same can be passed to avoid such trivial issue as it really kills lots of time in production
import requests
resp = requests.get('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIFTY_50')
print(resp.encoding)
with open ('NiftyList.txt', 'w') as f:
f.write(resp.text)
When I added encoding="utf-8" with the open command it saved the file with the correct response
with open ('NiftyList.txt', 'w', encoding="utf-8") as f:
f.write(resp.text)

Even I faced the same issue with the encoding that occurs when you try to print it, read/write it or open it. As others mentioned above adding .encoding="utf-8" will help if you are trying to print it.
soup.encode("utf-8")
If you are trying to open scraped data and maybe write it into a file, then open the file with (......,encoding="utf-8")
with open(filename_csv , 'w', newline='',encoding="utf-8") as csv_file:

For those still getting this error, adding encode("utf-8") to soup will also fix this.
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser').encode("utf-8")
print(soup)

There are multiple aspects to this problem. The fundamental question is which character set you want to output into. You may also have to figure out the input character set.
Printing (with either print or write) into a file with an explicit encoding="..." will translate Python's internal Unicode representation into that encoding. If the output contains characters which are not supported by that encoding, you will get an UnicodeEncodeError. For example, you can't write Russian or Chinese or Indic or Hebrew or Arabic or emoji or ... anything except a restricted set of some 200+ Western characters to a file whose encoding is "cp1252" because this limited 8-bit character set has no way to represent these characters.
Basically the same problem will occur with any 8-bit character set, including nearly all the legacy Windows code pages (437, 850, 1250, 1251, etc etc), though some of them support some additional script in addition to or instead of English (1251 supports Cyrillic, for example, so you can write Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian, etc). An 8-bit encoding has only a maximum of 256 character codes and no way to represent a character which isn't among them.
Perhaps now would be a good time to read Joel Spolsky's The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
On platforms where the terminal is not capable of printing Unicode (only Windows these days really, though if you're into retrocomputing, this problem was also prevalent on other platforms in the previous millennium) attempting to print Unicode strings can also produce this error, or output mojibake. If you see something like Héllö instead of Héllö, this is your issue.
In short, then, you need to know:
What is the character set of the page you scraped, or the data you received? Was it correctly scraped? Did the originator correctly identify its encoding, or are you able to otherwise obtain this information (or guess it)? Some web sites incorrectly declare a different character set than the page actually contains, some sites have incorrectly configured the connection between the web server and a back-end database. See e.g. scrape with correct character encoding (python requests + beautifulsoup) for a more detailed example with some solutions.
What is the character set you want to write? If printing to the screen, is your terminal correctly configured, and is your Python interpreter configured identically?
Perhaps see also How to display utf-8 in windows console
If you are here, probably the answer to one of these questions is not "UTF-8". This is increasingly becoming the prevalent encoding for web pages, too, though the former standard was ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin-1) and more recently Windows code page 1252.
Going forward, you basically want all your textual data to be Unicode, outside of a few fringe use cases. Generally, that means UTF-8, though on Windows (or if you need Java compatibility), UTF-16 is also vaguely viable, albeit somewhat cumbersome. (There are several other Unicode serialization formats, which may be useful in specialized circumstances. UTF-32 is technically trivial, but takes up a lot more memory; UTF-7 is used in a few network protocols where 7-bit ASCII is required for transport.)
Perhaps see also https://utf8everywhere.org/
Naturally, if you are printing to a file, you also need to examine that file using a tool which can correctly display it. A common pilot error is to open the file using a tool which only displays the currently selected system encoding, or one which tries to guess the encoding, but guesses wrong. Again, a common symptom when viewing UTF-8 text using Windows code page 1252 would result, for example, in Héllö displaying as Héllö.
If the encoding of character data is unknown, there is no simple way to automatically establish it. If you know what the text is supposed to represent, you can perhaps infer it, but this is typically a manual process with some guesswork involved. (Automatic tools like chardet and ftfy can help, but they get it wrong some of the time, too.)
To establish which encoding you are looking at, it can be helpful if you can identify the individual bytes in a character which isn't displayed correctly. For example, if you are looking at H\x8ell\x9a but expect it to represent Héllö, you can look up the bytes in a translation table. I have published one such table at https://tripleee.github.io/8bit where you can see that in this example, it's probably one of the legacy Mac 8-bit character sets; with more data points, perhaps you can narrow it down to just one of them (and if not, any one of them will do in practice, since all the code points you care about map to the same Unicode characters).
Python 3 on most platforms defaults to UTF-8 for all input and output, but on Windows, this is commonly not the case. It will then instead default to the system's default encoding (still misleadingly called "ANSI code page" in some Microsoft documentation), which depends on a number of factors. On Western systems, the default encoding out of the box is commonly Windows code page 1252.
(Earlier Python versions had somewhat different expectations, and in Python 2, the internal string representation was not Unicode.)
If you are on Windows and write UTF-8 to a text file, maybe specify encoding="utf-8-sig" which adds a BOM sequence at the beginning of the file. This is strictly speaking not necessary or correct, but some Windows tools need it to correctly identify the encoding.
Several of the earlier answers here suggest blindly applying some encoding, but hopefully this should help you understand how that's not generally the correct approach, and how to figure out - rather than guess - which encoding to use.

From Python 3.7 onwards,
Set the the environment variable PYTHONUTF8 to 1
The following script included other useful variables too which set System Environment Variables.
setx /m PYTHONUTF8 1
setx PATHEXT "%PATHEXT%;.PY" ; In CMD, Python file can be executed without extesnion.
setx /m PY_PYTHON 3.10 ; To set default python version for py
Source

I got the same error so I use (encoding="utf-8") and it solve the error.
This generally happens when we got some unidentified symbol or pattern in text data that our encoder does not understand.
with open("text.txt", "w", encoding='utf-8') as f:
f.write(data)
This will solve your problem.

if you are using windows try to pass encoding='latin1', encoding='iso-8859-1' or encoding='cp1252'
example:
csv_data = pd.read_csv(csvpath,encoding='iso-8859-1')
print(print(soup.encode('iso-8859-1')))

Python3 utf-8 decode issue

The following code runs fine with Python3 on my Windows machine and prints the character 'é':
data = b"\xc3\xa9"
print(data.decode('utf-8'))
However, running the same on an Ubuntu based docker container results in :
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xe9' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
Is there anything that I have to install to enable utf-8 decoding ?

Seems ubuntu - depending on version - uses one encoding or another as default, and it may vary between shell and python as well. Adopted from this posting and also this blog:
Thus the recommended way seems to be to tell your python instance to use utf-8 as default encoding:
Set your default encoding of python source files via environment variable:
export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8
Also, in your source files you can state the encoding you prefer to be used explicitly, so it should work irrespective of environment setting (see this question + answer, python docs and PEP 263:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
....
Concerning the interpretation of encoding of files read by python, you can specify it explicitly in the open command
with open(fname, "rt", encoding="utf-8") as f:
...
and there's a more hackish way with some side effects, but saves you to explicitly specify it each time
import sys
# sys.setdefaultencoding() does not exist, here!
reload(sys) # Reload does the trick!
sys.setdefaultencoding('UTF8')
Please read the warnings about this hack in the related answer and comments.

The problem is with the print() expression, not with the decode() method.
If you look closely, the raised exception is a UnicodeEncodeError, not a -DecodeError.
Whenever you use the print() function, Python converts its arguments to a str and subsequently encodes the result to bytes, which are sent to the terminal (or whatever Python is run in).
The codec which is used for encoding (eg. UTF-8 or ASCII) depends on the environment.
In an ideal case,
the codec which Python uses is compatible with the one which the terminal expects, so the characters are displayed correctly (otherwise you get mojibake like "é" instead of "é");
the codec used covers a range of characters that is sufficient for your needs (such as UTF-8 or UTF-16, which contain all characters).
In your case, the second condition isn't met for the Linux docker you mention: the encoding used is ASCII, which only supports characters found on an old English typewriter.
These are a few options to address this problem:
Set environment variables: on Linux, Python's encoding defaults depend on this (at least partially). In my experience, this is a bit of a trial and error; setting LC_ALL to something containing "UTF-8" worked for me once. You'll have to put them in start-up script for the shell your terminal runs, eg. .bashrc.
Re-encode STDOUT, like so:
sys.stdout = open(sys.stdout.buffer.fileno(), 'w', encoding='utf8')
The encoding used has to match the one of the terminal.
Encode the strings yourself and send them to the binary buffer underlying sys.stdout, eg. sys.stdout.buffer.write("é".encode('utf8')). This is of course much more boilerplate than print("é"). Again, the encoding used has to match the one of the terminal.
Avoid print() altogether. Use open(fn, encoding=...) for output, the logging module for progress info – depending on how interactive your script is, this might be worthwhile (admittedly, you'll probably face the same encoding problem when writing to STDERR with the logging module).
There might be other options, but I doubt that there are nicer ones.

How to use "with open as f" for all files within a directory [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Python, Unicode, and the Windows console
(15 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
I am writing a Python (Python 3.3) program to send some data to a webpage using POST method. Mostly for debugging process I am getting the page result and displaying it on the screen using print() function.
The code is like this:
conn.request("POST", resource, params, headers)
response = conn.getresponse()
print(response.status, response.reason)
data = response.read()
print(data.decode('utf-8'));
the HTTPResponse .read() method returns a bytes element encoding the page (which is a well formated UTF-8 document) It seemed okay until I stopped using IDLE GUI for Windows and used the Windows console instead. The returned page has a U+2014 character (em-dash) which the print function translates well in the Windows GUI (I presume Code Page 1252) but does not in the Windows Console (Code Page 850). Given the strict default behavior I get the following error:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2014' in position 10248: character maps to <undefined>
I could fix it using this quite ugly code:
print(data.decode('utf-8').encode('cp850','replace').decode('cp850'))
Now it replace the offending character "—" with a ?. Not the ideal case (a hyphen should be a better replacement) but good enough for my purpose.
There are several things I do not like from my solution.
The code is ugly with all that decoding, encoding, and decoding.
It solves the problem for just this case. If I port the program for a system using some other encoding (latin-1, cp437, back to cp1252, etc.) it should recognize the target encoding. It does not. (for instance, when using again the IDLE GUI, the emdash is also lost, which didn't happen before)
It would be nicer if the emdash translated to a hyphen instead of a interrogation bang.
The problem is not the emdash (I can think of several ways to solve that particularly problem) but I need to write robust code. I am feeding the page with data from a database and that data can come back. I can anticipate many other conflicting cases: an 'Á' U+00c1 (which is possible in my database) could translate into CP-850 (DOS/Windows Console encodign for Western European Languages) but not into CP-437 (encoding for US English, which is default in many Windows instalations).
So, the question:
Is there a nicer solution that makes my code agnostic from the output interface encoding?

I see three solutions to this:
Change the output encoding, so it will always output UTF-8. See e.g. Setting the correct encoding when piping stdout in Python, but I could not get these example to work.
Following example code makes the output aware of your target charset.
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys
print sys.stdout.encoding
print u"Stöcker".encode(sys.stdout.encoding, errors='replace')
print u"Стоескер".encode(sys.stdout.encoding, errors='replace')
This example properly replaces any non-printable character in my name with a question mark.
If you create a custom print function, e.g. called myprint, using that mechanisms to encode output properly you can simply replace print with myprint whereever necessary without making the whole code look ugly.
Reset the output encoding globally at the begin of the software:
The page http://www.macfreek.nl/memory/Encoding_of_Python_stdout has a good summary what to do to change output encoding. Especially the section "StreamWriter Wrapper around Stdout" is interesting. Essentially it says to change the I/O encoding function like this:
In Python 2:
if sys.stdout.encoding != 'cp850':
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('cp850')(sys.stdout, 'strict')
if sys.stderr.encoding != 'cp850':
sys.stderr = codecs.getwriter('cp850')(sys.stderr, 'strict')
In Python 3:
if sys.stdout.encoding != 'cp850':
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('cp850')(sys.stdout.buffer, 'strict')
if sys.stderr.encoding != 'cp850':
sys.stderr = codecs.getwriter('cp850')(sys.stderr.buffer, 'strict')
If used in CGI outputting HTML you can replace 'strict' by 'xmlcharrefreplace' to get HTML encoded tags for non-printable characters.
Feel free to modify the approaches, setting different encodings, .... Note that it still wont work to output non-specified data. So any data, input, texts must be correctly convertable into unicode:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys
import codecs
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter("iso-8859-1")(sys.stdout, 'xmlcharrefreplace')
print u"Stöcker" # works
print "Stöcker".decode("utf-8") # works
print "Stöcker" # fails

Based on Dirk Stöcker's answer, here's a neat wrapper function for Python 3's print function. Use it just like you would use print.
As an added bonus, compared to the other answers, this won't print your text as a bytearray ('b"content"'), but as normal strings ('content'), because of the last decode step.
def uprint(*objects, sep=' ', end='\n', file=sys.stdout):
enc = file.encoding
if enc == 'UTF-8':
print(*objects, sep=sep, end=end, file=file)
else:
f = lambda obj: str(obj).encode(enc, errors='backslashreplace').decode(enc)
print(*map(f, objects), sep=sep, end=end, file=file)
uprint('foo')
uprint(u'Antonín Dvořák')
uprint('foo', 'bar', u'Antonín Dvořák')

For debugging purposes, you could use print(repr(data)).
To display text, always print Unicode. Don't hardcode the character encoding of your environment such as Cp850 inside your script. To decode the HTTP response, see A good way to get the charset/encoding of an HTTP response in Python.
To print Unicode to Windows console, you could use win-unicode-console package.

I dug deeper into this and found the best solutions are here.
http://blog.notdot.net/2010/07/Getting-unicode-right-in-Python
In my case I solved "UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character "
original code:
print("Process lines, file_name command_line %s\n"% command_line))
New code:
print("Process lines, file_name command_line %s\n"% command_line.encode('utf-8'))

If you are using Windows command line to print the data, you should use
chcp 65001
This worked for me!

If you use Python 3.6 (possibly 3.5 or later), it doesn't give that error to me anymore. I had a similar issue, because I was using v3.4, but it went away after I uninstalled and reinstalled.

Can't print character '\u2019' in Python from JSON object

As a project to help me learn Python, I'm making a CMD viewer of Reddit using the json data (for example www.reddit.com/all/.json). When certain posts show up and I attempt to print them (that's what I assume is causing the error), I get this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\nsaba\Desktop\reddit_viewer.py", line 33, in
print ( "%d. (%d) %s\n" % (i+1, obj['data']['score'], obj['data']['title']))
File "C:\Python33\lib\encodings\cp437.py", line 19, in encode
return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_map)[0]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2019' in position
32: character maps to
Here is where I handle the data:
request = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
content = request.read().decode('utf-8')
jstuff = json.loads(content)
The line I use to print the data as listed in the error above:
print ( "%d. (%d) %s\n" % (i+1, obj['data']['score'], obj['data']['title']))
Can anyone suggest where I might be going wrong?

It's almost certain that you problem has nothing to do with the code you've shown, and can be reproduced in one line:
print(u'\2019')
If your terminal's character set can't handle U+2019 (or if Python is confused about what character set your terminal uses), there's no way to print it out. It doesn't matter whether it comes from JSON or anywhere else.
The Windows terminal (aka "DOS prompt" or "cmd window") is usually configured for a character set like cp1252 that only knows about 256 of the 110000 characters, and there's nothing Python can do about this without a major change to the language implementation.*
See PrintFails on the Python Wiki for details, workarounds, and links to more information. There are also a few hundred dups of this problem on SO (although many of them will be specific to Python 2.x, without mentioning it).
* Windows has a whole separate set of APIs for printing UTF-16 to the terminal, so Python could detect that stdout is a Windows terminal, and if so encode to UTF-16 and use the special APIs instead of encoding to the terminal's charset and using the standard ones. But this raises a bunch of different problems (e.g., different ways of printing to stdout getting out of sync). There's been discussion about making these changes, but even if everyone were to agree and the patch were written tomorrow, it still wouldn't help you until you upgrade to whatever future version of Python it's added to…

#N-Saba, what is the string that causes the error to be thrown?
In my test case, this looks to be a version-specific bug in python 2.7.3.
In the feed I was parsing, the "title" field had the following value:
u'title': u'Intel\u2019s Sharp-Eyed Social Scientist'
I get the expected right single quote char when I call either of these, in python 2.7.6.
python -c "print {u'title': u'Intel\u2019s Sharp-Eyed Social Scientist'}['title']"
Intel’s Sharp-Eyed Social Scientist
In 2.7.3, I get the error, unless I encode the value that I pulled by KeyName.
print {u'title': u'Intel\u2019s Sharp-Eyed Social Scientist'}['title']
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019' in position 5: ordinal not in range(128)
print {u'title': u'Intel\u2019s Sharp-Eyed Social Scientist'}['title'].encode('utf-8', 'replace')
Intel’s Sharp-Eyed Social Scientist
fwiw, the #abamert command print('\u2019') prints "9". I think the intended code was print(u'\u2019').

I came across a similar error when attempting to write an API JSON output to a .cav file via pd.DataFrame.to_csv() on a Win install of Python 2.7.14.
Specifying the encoding as utf-8 fixed my process:
pd.DataFrame.to_csv(filename, encoding='utf-8')

For anyone encountering this in macOS, #abarnert's answer is correct and I was able to fix it by putting this at the top of the offending source file:-
# magic to make everything work in Unicode
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')
To clarify, this is making sure the terminal output accepts Unicode correctly.

I set IDLE (Python Shell) and Window's CMD default font to Lucida Console (a utf-8 supported font) and these types of errors went away; and you no longer see boxes [][][][][][][][]
:)

How to convert html entities into symbols?

I have made some adaptations to the script from this answer. and I am having problems with unicode. Some of the questions end up being written poorly.
Some answers and responses end up looking like:
Yeah.. I know.. I’m a simpleton.. So what’s a Singleton? (2)
How can I make the ’ to be translated to the right character?
Note: If that matters, I'm using python 2.6, on a French windows.
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'
>>> sys.getfilesystemencoding()
'mbcs'
EDIT1: Based on Ryan Ginstrom's post, I have been able to correct a part of the output, but I am having problems with python's unicode.
In Idle / python shell:
Yeah.. I know.. I’m a simpleton.. So
what’s a Singleton?
In a text file, when redirecting stdout
Yeah.. I know.. I’m a simpleton.. So
what’s a Singleton?
How can I correct that ?
Edit2: I have tried Jarret Hardie's solution but it didn't do anything.
I am on windows, using python 2.6, so my site-packages folder is at:
C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages
There was no siteconfig.py file, so I created one, pasted the code provided by Jarret Hardie, started a python interpreter, but seems like it has not been loaded.
sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'
I noticed there is a site.py file at :
C:\Python26\Lib\site.py
I tried changing the encoding in the function
def setencoding():
"""Set the string encoding used by the Unicode implementation. The
default is 'ascii', but if you're willing to experiment, you can
change this."""
encoding = "ascii" # Default value set by _PyUnicode_Init()
if 0:
# Enable to support locale aware default string encodings.
import locale
loc = locale.getdefaultlocale()
if loc[1]:
encoding = loc[1]
if 0:
# Enable to switch off string to Unicode coercion and implicit
# Unicode to string conversion.
encoding = "undefined"
if encoding != "ascii":
# On Non-Unicode builds this will raise an AttributeError...
sys.setdefaultencoding(encoding) # Needs Python Unicode build !
to set the encoding to utf-8. It worked (after a restart of python of course).
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'utf-8'
The sad thing is that it didn't correct the caracters in my program. :(

You should be able to convert HTMl/XML entities into Unicode characters. Check out this answer in SO:
Decoding HTML Entities With Python
Basically you want something like this:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(urllib2.urlopen(URL),
convertEntities=BeautifulStoneSoup.ALL_ENTITIES)

Does changing your default encoding in siteconfig.py work?
In your site-packages file (on my OS X system it's in /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/) create a file called siteconfig.py. In this file put:
import sys
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')
The setdefaultencoding method is removed from the sys module once siteconfig.py is processed, so you must put it in site-packages so that Python will read it when the interpreter starts up.