How to write UTF-8 in a CSV file

Question

I am trying to create a text file in csv format out of a PyQt4 QTableWidget. I want to write the text with a UTF-8 encoding because it contains special characte

Answer 1

A very simple hack is to use the json import instead of csv. For example instead of csv.writer just do the following:

    fd = codecs.open(tempfilename, 'wb', 'utf-8')  
    for c in whatever :
        fd.write( json.dumps(c) [1:-1] )   # json dumps writes ["a",..]
        fd.write('\n')
    fd.close()

Basically, given the list of fields in correct order, the json formatted string is identical to a csv line except for [ and ] at the start and end respectively. And json seems to be robust to utf-8 in python 2.*