Python Unicode Encode Error

You can use something of the form

s.decode('utf-8')

which will convert a UTF-8 encoded bytestring into a Python Unicode string. But the exact procedure to use depends on exactly how you load and parse the XML file, e.g. if you don’t ever access the XML string directly, you might have to use a decoder object from the codecs module.

A better solution:

if type(value) == str:
    # Ignore errors even if the string is not proper UTF-8 or has
    # broken marker bytes.
    # Python built-in function unicode() can do this.
    value = unicode(value, "utf-8", errors="ignore")
else:
    # Assume the value object has proper __unicode__() method
    value = unicode(value)

If you would like to read more about why:

http://docs.plone.org/manage/troubleshooting/unicode.html#id1

Don’t hardcode the character encoding of your environment inside your script; print Unicode text directly instead:

assert isinstance(text, unicode) # or str on Python 3
print(text)

If your output is redirected to a file (or a pipe); you could use PYTHONIOENCODING envvar, to specify the character encoding:

$ PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 python your_script.py >output.utf8

Otherwise, python your_script.py should work as is — your locale settings are used to encode the text (on POSIX check: LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG envvars — set LANG to a utf-8 locale if necessary).

To print Unicode on Windows, see this answer that shows how to print Unicode to Windows console, to a file, or using IDLE.

I wrote the following to fix the nuisance non-ascii quotes and force conversion to something usable.

unicodeToAsciiMap = {u'u2019':"'", u'u2018':"`", }

def unicodeToAscii(inStr):
    try:
        return str(inStr)
    except:
        pass
    outStr = ""
    for i in inStr:
        try:
            outStr = outStr + str(i)
        except:
            if unicodeToAsciiMap.has_key(i):
                outStr = outStr + unicodeToAsciiMap[i]
            else:
                try:
                    print "unicodeToAscii: add to map:", i, repr(i), "(encoded as _)"
                except:
                    print "unicodeToAscii: unknown code (encoded as _)", repr(i)
                outStr = outStr + "_"
    return outStr

Try adding the following line at the top of your python script.

# _*_ coding:utf-8 _*_

Excellent post : http://www.carlosble.com/2010/12/understanding-python-and-unicode/

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

def __if_number_get_string(number):
    converted_str = number
    if isinstance(number, int) or 
            isinstance(number, float):
        converted_str = str(number)
    return converted_str


def get_unicode(strOrUnicode, encoding='utf-8'):
    strOrUnicode = __if_number_get_string(strOrUnicode)
    if isinstance(strOrUnicode, unicode):
        return strOrUnicode
    return unicode(strOrUnicode, encoding, errors='ignore')


def get_string(strOrUnicode, encoding='utf-8'):
    strOrUnicode = __if_number_get_string(strOrUnicode)
    if isinstance(strOrUnicode, unicode):
        return strOrUnicode.encode(encoding)
    return strOrUnicode

If you need to print an approximate representation of the string to the screen, rather than ignoring those nonprintable characters, please try unidecode package here:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Unidecode

The explanation is found here:

https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2009/01/unicode_transliteration_in_python/

This is better than using the u.encode('ascii', 'ignore') for a given string u, and can save you from unnecessary headache if character precision is not what you are after, but still want to have human readability.

Wirawan

Python 3.5, 2018

If you don’t know what the encoding but the unicode parser is having issues you can open the file in Notepad++ and in the top bar select Encoding->Convert to ANSI. Then you can write your python like this

with open('filepath', 'r', encoding='ANSI') as file:
    for word in file.read().split():
        print(word)