UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 3 2: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

I am parsing an xsl file using xlrd. Most of the things are working fine. I have a dictionary where keys are strings and values are lists of strings. All the keys and values

Answer 1

As here str(u'\u2013') is causing error so use isinstance(foo,basestring) to check for unicode/string, if not of type base string convert it into Unicode and then apply encode

if isinstance(foo,basestring):
    foo.encode('utf8')
else:
    unicode(foo).encode('utf8')

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