How To Fix Python Error - UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' Codec Can't ...

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This is a very common error

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe0' in position x

Fix - UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0':

Quite common error while dealing with unicode characters if you fetch or crawl data from different web pages (on different sites). Let's understand why this problem is happening -

• When you try to use the Python string function, it uses the default character encoding .
  • If you check sys.stdout.encoding value , sometimes it is "None".
  • The default can be located in - /etc/default/locale in case of Linux
  • And the default is defined by the variables LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE
  • See what values are set against these variables.
  • For example - If the default is UTF-8 , these would be LANG="UTF-8" , LC_ALL="UTF-8" , LC_CTYPE="UTF-8"
• Now assume default encoding is "XYZ" . Hence Python tries to encode the bytes (input data\text) using this encoding.
• Assume some of "these" text\data representations belong to unicode characters.
• Now if the default character encoding used is not equipped to handle that, the error pops out.
• So to handle this issue , you have to specify the "RIGHT" encode option to Python so it knows how to handle it.
• A Standard option is to use "UTF-8" as a encode option. It more or less works fine.
• There are other ways also to workout\ignore the error. We will see that.

  The Python string function handles the below set of ASCII characters comfortably -

whitespace = ' \t\n\r\v\f' ascii_lowercase = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz' ascii_uppercase = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' ascii_letters = ascii_lowercase + ascii_uppercase digits = '0123456789' hexdigits = digits + 'abcdef' + 'ABCDEF' octdigits = '01234567' punctuation = r"""!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[]^_`{|}~""" printable = digits + ascii_letters + punctuation + whitespace   Fix -

• Set the Python encoding to UTF-8. This will ensure the fix for the current session .

$ export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8

• Set the environment variables correctly in /etc/default/locale .  This sets the system`s default locale encoding to the UTF-8 format.

LANG="UTF-8" or "en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL="UTF-8" or "en_US.UTF-8" LC_CTYPE="UTF-8" or "en_US.UTF-8" Or use command line export LC_ALL="UTF-8" export LC_ALL="UTF-8" export LC_CTYPE="UTF-8"

• Set the encoding at code level.

str1 = <STRING_WITH_UNICODE_CHARACTER> str2 = str1.encode('utf-8') print (str1.encode('utf-8')) print (str2) str1 = <STRING_WITH_UNICODE_CHARACTER> str2 = str1.encode('utf-8', 'ignore').decode('utf-8') print (str2)

• Set the encoding using sys

# encoding=utf8 from __future__ import unicode_literals import sys reload(sys) sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

• Set the encoding using locale

import os import locale os.environ["PYTHONIOENCODING"] = "utf-8" scriptLocale=locale.setlocale(category=locale.LC_ALL, locale="en_GB.UTF-8")

• Set the encoding using Emacs

#!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- u = 'abcdé' print(ord(u[-1])) #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- #!/usr/bin/env python # coding: utf8

• If you can safely ignore or bypass or throw out the unicode characters or you do not need those , you can also use below option . In this example , str2 will no longer have any unicode characters (those are ignored or dropped).

str2 = str1.encode('ascii', 'ignore').decode('ascii') print (str2)

• Use codecs for file operation - codecs.open(encoding=”utf-8″) - File handling (Read and write files to and from Unicode) . The encoding can be anything utf-8, utf-16, utf-32 etc.

import codecs opened = codecs.open("inputfile.txt", "r", "utf-8")

Additional points :

• In Python 3 as UTF-8 is the default source encoding
• encode() function converts the Unicode to bytes (returns a bytes representation of the Unicode string). Various encode() options -
  • encode('ascii', 'ignore')
  • encode('ascii', 'replace')
  • encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')
  • encode('ascii', 'backslashreplace')
  • encode('ascii', 'namereplace')
• decode() function converts the bytes to a String . This method takes an encoding argument, such as UTF-8, and optionally an errors argument. The errors argument (e.g. "ignore") specifies the response when the string can’t be converted with the encoding.Various decode() options -
  • decode("utf-8", "strict")
  • decode("utf-8", "replace")
  • decode("utf-8", "backslashreplace")
  • decode("utf-8", "ignore")
• UTF-8 properties -
  • Can handle any Unicode code point.
  • A string of ASCII text is also valid UTF-8 text.
  • UTF-8 is a byte oriented encoding. The encoding specifies that each character is represented by a specific sequence of one or more bytes. This avoids the byte-ordering issues that can occur with integer and word oriented encodings, like UTF-16 and UTF-32, where the sequence of bytes varies depending on the hardware on which the string was encoded.

  Hope this helps to solve the issue.  

Other Interesting Reads -

• How to log an error in Python ?

• How to Code Custom Exception Handling in Python ?

• How to Handle Errors and Exceptions in Python ?

• How to Handle Bad or Corrupt records in Apache Spark ?

 

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