We Keep Coding

"ascii" codec can't encode characters in position 0-2: ordinal not in range(128)

I am using python 2.7 and used Chinese characters in my code, so...
# coding = utf-8
and the problem is part of my code, as follows:
def fileoutput():
global percent_shown
date = str(datetime.datetime.now()).decode('utf-8')
with open("result.txt","a") as datafile:
datafile.write(date+" "+str(percent_shown.get()))
percent_shown is a string that includes Chinese characters
When I run it, I get:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-2: ordinal not in range(128)
How to fix it? Thanks

As per PEP 263, the coding declaration must match the regular expression r"^[ \t\v]*#.*?coding[:=][ \t]*([-_.a-zA-Z0-9]+)" so you need to get rid of the space between "coding" and the equal sign:
# coding=utf-8
This declaration tells python that the .py file itself is utf-8 encoded, but doesn't change the rest of the program. This is useful if you are writing unicode literals but you still need to cast them to unicde properly to make sure things work.
Since you haven't shown us what you are trying to print, I found some Chinese characters to demonstrate. I have no idea what they mean... so appollogies for anyone I insult!
foo = u"学而设" # Good! you've got a unicode string
bar = "学而设" # Bad! you've got a utf-8 encoded string that python
# thinks is ascii
I think you can fix your program with a few tweaks. First, don't try to decode datetime.now(). Its just ascii. It didn't change its return type just because you declared the source file encoding. Second, use the codecs module to open the file with the encoding you wnat (I'm assuming its utf-8). Now, since you are working with unicode strings you can write them directly to the file.
import codecs
def fileoutput():
date = unicode(datetime.datetime.now())
with codecs.open("result.txt","a", encoding="utf-8") as datafile:
datafile.write(date+" "+percent_shown.get())

You can't have whitespace before the = in your coding comment. Try:
# coding=utf-8
See the regular expression in: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/

Converting Unicode to in python [duplicate]

This question already has an answer here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Convert Unicode to UTF-8 Python
I'm a very new python programmer, working on my first script. the script pulls in text from a plist string, then does some things to it, then packages it up as an HTML email.
from a few of the entries, I'm getting the dreaded Unicode "outside ordinal 128" error.
Having read as much as I can find about encoding, and decoding, I know that it is important for me to get the encoded, but I'm having a difficult time understanding when or how exactly to do this.
The offending variable is first pulled in using plistlib, and converted to HTML from markdown, like this:
entry = result['Entry Text']
donotecontent = markdown2.markdown(entry)
Later, it is put in the email like this:
html = donotecontent + '<br /><br />' + var3
part1 = MIMEText(html, 'html')
msg.attach(part1)
My question is, what is the best way for me to make sure that Unicode characters in this content doesn't cause this to throw an error. I prefer not to ignore the characters.

Sorry for my broken english. I am speaking Chinese/Japanese, and using CJK characters everyday.
Ceron solved almost of this problem, thus I won't talk about how to use encode()/decode() again.
When we use str() to cast any unicode object, it will encode unicode string to bytedata; when we use unicode() to cast str object, it will decode bytedata to unicode character.
And, the encoding must be what returned from sys.getdefaultencoding().
In default, sys.getdefaultencoding() return 'ascii' by default, the encoding/decoding exception may be thrown when doing str()/unicode() casting.
If you want to do str <-> unicode conversion by str() or unicode(), and also, implicity encoding/decoding with 'utf-8', you can execute the following statement:
import sys # sys.setdefaultencoding is cancelled by site.py
reload(sys) # to re-enable sys.setdefaultencoding()
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')
and it will cause later execution of str() and unicode() convert any basestring object with encoding utf-8.
However, I would prefer to use encode()/decode() explicitly, because it makes code maintenance easier for me.

Assuming you're using Python 2.x, remember: there are two types of strings: str and unicode. str are byte strings, whereas unicode are unicode strings. unicode strings can be used to represent text in any language, but to store text in a computer or to send it via email, you need to represent that text using bytes. To represent text using bytes, you need an coding format. There are many coding formats, Python uses ascii by default, but ascii can only represent a few characters, mostly english letters. If you try to encode a text with other letters using ascii, you will get the famous "outside ordinal 128". For example:
>>> u'Cerón'.encode('ascii')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf3' in position 3:
ordinal not in range(128)
The same happens if you use str(u'Cerón'), because Python uses ascii by default to convert unicode to str.
To make this work, you have to use a different coding format. UTF-8 is a coding format that can express any unicode text as bytes. To convert the u'Cerón' unicode string to bytes you have to use:
>>> u'Cerón'.encode('utf-8')
'Cer\xc3\xb3n'
No errors this time.
Now, back to your email problem. I can see that you're using MIMEText, which accepts an already encoded str argument, in your case is the html variable. MIMEText also accepts an argument specifying what kind of encoding is being used. So, in your case, if html is a unicode string, you have to encode it as utf-8 and pass the charset parameter too (because HTMLText uses ascii by default):
part1 = MIMEText(html.encode('utf-8'), 'html', 'utf-8')
But be careful, because if html is already a str instead of unicode, then the encoding will fail. This is one of the problems of Python 2.x, it allows you to encode an already encoded string but it throws an error.
Another problem to add to the list is that utf-8 is compatible with ascii characters, and Python will always try to automatically encode/decode strings using ascii. If you're not properly encoding your strings, but you only use ascii characters, things will work fine. However, if for some reason some non-ascii characters slips into your message, you will get the error, this makes errors harder to detect.

Remember: You can't decode a unicode, and you can't encode a str
>>> u"\xa0".decode("ascii", "ignore")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#7>", line 1, in <module>
u"\xa0".decode("ascii", "ignore")
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> "\xc2".encode("ascii", "ignore")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>
"\xc2".encode("ascii", "ignore")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
Checkout this excellent tutorial

Reading Unicode Files - Python3.2

I'm trying to read some files using Python3.2, the some of the files may contain unicode while others do not.
When I try:
file = open(item_path + item, encoding="utf-8")
for line in file:
print (repr(line))
I get the error:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 13-16: ordinal not in range(128)
I am following the documentation here: http://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/howto/unicode.html
Why would Python be trying to encode to ascii at any point in this code?

The problem is that repr(line) in Python 3 returns also the Unicode string. It does not convert the above 128 characters to the ASCII escape sequences.
Use ascii(line) instead if you want to see the escape sequences.
Actually, the repr(line) is expected to return the string that if placed in a source code would produce the object with the same value. This way, the Python 3 behaviour is just fine as there is no need for ASCII escape sequences in the source files to express a string with more than ASCII characters. It is quite natural to use UTF-8 or some other Unicode encoding these day. The truth is that Python 2 produced the escape sequences for such characters.

What's your output encoding? If you remove the call to print(), does it start working?
I suspect you've got a non-UTF-8 locale, so Python is trying to encode repr(line) as ASCII as part of printing it.
To resolve the issue, you must either encode the string and print the byte array, or set your default encoding to something that can handle your strings (UTF-8 being the obvious choice).

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa3'

I have an Excel spreadsheet that I'm reading in that contains some £ signs.
When I try to read it in using the xlrd module, I get the following error:
x = table.cell_value(row, col)
x = x.decode("ISO-8859-1")
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa3' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
If I rewrite this to x.encode('utf-8') it stops throwing an error, but unfortunately when I then write the data out somewhere else (as latin-1), the £ signs have all become garbled.
How can I fix this, and read the £ signs in correctly?
--- UPDATE ---
Some kind readers have suggested that I don't need to decode it at all, or that I can just encode it to Latin-1 when I need to. The problem with this is that I need to write the data to a CSV file eventually, and it seems to object to the raw strings.
If I don't encode or decode the data at all, then this happens (after I've added the string to an array called items):
for item in items:
#item = [x.encode('latin-1') for x in item]
cleancsv.writerow(item)
File "clean_up_barnet.py", line 104, in <module>
cleancsv.writerow(item)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2022' in position 43: ordinal not in range(128)
I get the same error even if I uncomment the Latin-1 line.

A very easy way around all the "'ascii' codec can't encode character…" issues with csvwriter is to instead use unicodecsv, a drop-in replacement for csvwriter.
Install unicodecsv with pip and then you can use it in the exact same way, eg:
import unicodecsv
file = open('users.csv', 'w')
w = unicodecsv.writer(file)
for user in User.objects.all().values_list('first_name', 'last_name', 'email', 'last_login'):
w.writerow(user)

For what it's worth: I'm the author of xlrd.
Does xlrd produce unicode?
Option 1: Read the Unicode section at the bottom of the first screenful of xlrd doc: This module presents all text strings as Python unicode objects.
Option 2: print type(text), repr(text)
You say """If I rewrite this to x.encode('utf-8') it stops throwing an error, but unfortunately when I then write the data out somewhere else (as latin-1), the £ signs have all become garbled.""" Of course if you write UTF-8-encoded text to a device that's expecting latin1, it will be garbled. What do did you expect?
You say in your edit: """I get the same error even if I uncomment the Latin-1 line""". This is very unlikely -- much more likely is that you got a slightly different error (mentioning the latin1 codec instead of the ascii codec) in a different source line (the uncommented latin1 line instead of the writerow line). Reading error messages carefully aids understanding.
Your problem here is that in general your data is NOT encodable in latin1; very little real-world data is. Your POUND SIGN is encodable in latin1, but that's not all your non-ASCII data. The problematic character is U+2022 BULLET which is not encodable in latin1.
It would have helped you get a better answer sooner if you had mentioned up front that you were working on Mac OS X ... the usual suspect for a CSV-suitable encoding is cp1252 (Windows), not mac-roman.

Your code snippet says x.decode, but you're getting an encode error -- meaning x is Unicode already, so, to "decode" it, it must be first turned into a string of bytes (and that's where the default codec ansi comes up and fails). In your text then you say "if I rewrite ot to x.encode"... which seems to imply that you do know x is Unicode.
So what it IS you're doing -- and what it is you mean to be doing -- encoding a unicode x to get a coded string of bytes, or decoding a string of bytes into a unicode object?
I find it unfortunate that you can call encode on a byte string, and decode on a unicode object, because I find it seems to lead users to nothing but confusion... but at least in this case you seem to manage to propagate the confusion (at least to me;-).
If, as it seems, x is unicode, then you never want to "decode" it -- you may want to encode it to get a byte string with a certain codec, e.g. latin-1, if that's what you need for some kind of I/O purposes (for your own internal program use I recommend sticking with unicode all the time -- only encode/decode if and when you absolutely need, or receive, coded byte strings for input / output purposes).

x = x.decode("ISO-8859-1")
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa3' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
Look closely: You got a Unicode***Encode***Error calling the decode method.
The reason for this is that decode is intended to convert from a byte sequence (str) to a unicode object. But, as John said, xlrd already uses Unicode strings, so x is already a unicode object.
In this situation, Python 2.x assumes that you meant to decode a str object, so it "helpfully" creates one for you. But in order to convert a unicode to a str, it needs an encoding, and chooses ASCII because it's the lowest common denominator of character encodings. Your code effectively gets interpreted as
x = x.encode('ascii').decode("ISO-8859-1")
which fails because x contains a non-ASCII character.
Since x is already a unicode object, the decode is unnecessary. However, now you run into the problem that the Python 2.x csv module doesn't support Unicode. You have to convert your data to str objects.
for item in items:
item = [x.encode('latin-1') for x in item]
cleancsv.writerow(item)
This would be correct, except that you have the • character (U+2022 BULLET) in your data, and Latin-1 can't represent it. There are several ways around this problem:
Write x.encode('latin-1', 'ignore') to remove the bullet (or other non-Latin-1 characters).
Write x.encode('latin-1', 'replace') to replace the bullet with a question mark.
Replace the bullets with a Latin-1 character like * or ·.
Use a character encoding that does contain all the characters you need.
These days, UTF-8 is widely supported, so there is little reason to use any other encoding for text files.

xlrd works with Unicode, so the string you get back is a Unicode string. The £-sign has code point U+00A3, so the representation of said string should be u'\xa3'. This has been read in correctly; it is the string that you should be working with throughout your program.
When you write this (abstract, Unicode) string somewhere, you need to choose an encoding. At that point, you should .encode it into that encoding, say latin-1.
>>> book = xlrd.open_workbook( "test.xls" )
>>> sh = book.sheet_by_index( 0 )
>>> x = sh.cell_value( 0, 0 )
>>> x
u'\xa3'
>>> print x
£
# sample outputs (for e.g. writing to a file)
>>> x.encode( "latin-1" )
'\xa3'
>>> x.encode( "utf-8" )
'\xc2\xa3'
# garbage, because x is already Unicode
>>> x.decode( "ascii" )
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa3' in position 0:
ordinal not in range(128)
>>>

Working with xlrd, I have in a line ...xl_data.find(str(cell_value))... which gives the error:"'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xdf' in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)". All suggestions in the forums have been useless for my german words. But changing into: ...xl_data.find(cell.value)... gives no error. So, I suppose using strings as arguments in certain commands with xldr has specific encoding problems.

Python unicode problem

I'm receiving some data from a ZODB (Zope Object Database). I receive a mybrains object. Then I do:
o = mybrains.getObject()
and I receive a "Person" object in my project. Then, I can do
b = o.name
and doing print b on my class I get:
José Carlos
and print b.name.__class__
<type 'unicode'>
I have a lot of "Person" objects. They are added to a list.
names = [o.nome, o1.nome, o2.nome]
Then, I trying to create a text file with this data.
delimiter = ';'
all = delimiter.join(names) + '\n'
No problem. Now, when I do a print all I have:
José Carlos;Jonas;Natália
Juan;John
But when I try to create a file of it:
f = open("/tmp/test.txt", "w")
f.write(all)
I get an error like this (the positions aren't exaclty the same, since I change the names)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 84: ordinal not in range(128)
If I can print already with the "correct" form to display it, why I can't write a file with it? Which encode/decode method should I use to write a file with this data?
I'm using Python 2.4.5 (can't upgrade it)

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec
write is trying to encode the string using the ascii codec (which doesn't have a way of encoding accented characters like é or à.
Instead use
import codecs
with codecs.open("/tmp/test.txt",'w',encoding='utf-8') as f:
f.write(all.decode('utf-8'))
or choose some other codec (like cp1252) which can encode the characters in your string.
PS. all.decode('utf-8') was used above because f.write expects a unicode string. Better than using all.decode('utf-8') would be to convert all your strings to unicode early, work in unicode, and encode to a specific encoding like 'utf-8' late -- only when you have to.
PPS. It looks like names might already be a list of unicode strings. In that case, define delimiter to be a unicode string too: delimiter = u';', so all will be a unicode string. Then
with codecs.open("/tmp/test.txt",'w',encoding='utf-8') as f:
f.write(all)
should work (unless there is some issue with Python 2.4 that I'm not aware of.)
If 'utf-8' does not work, remember to try other encodings that contain the characters you need, and that your computer knows about. On Windows, that might mean 'cp1252'.

You told Python to print all, but since all has no fixed computer representation, Python first had to convert all to some printable form. Since you didn't tell Python how to do the conversion, it assumed you wanted ASCII. Unfortunately, ASCII can only handle values from 0 to 127, and all contains values out of that range, hence you see an error.
To fix this use:
all = "José Carlos;Jonas;Natália Juan;John"
import codecs
f = codecs.open("/tmp/test.txt", "w", "utf-8")
f.write(all.decode("utf-8"))
f.close()