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

I had exactly this issue in a recent project which really is a pain in the rear. I finally found it's because the Python we used in Docker has encoding "ansi_x3.4-1968" instead of "utf-8". So if anyone out there using Docker and got this error, following these steps may thoroughly solve your problem.

1. create a file and name it default_locale in the same directory of your Dockerfile, put this line in it,

   environment=LANG="es_ES.utf8", LC_ALL="es_ES.UTF-8", LC_LANG="es_ES.UTF-8"

2. add these to your Dockerfile,

   RUN apt-get clean && apt-get update && apt-get install -y locales

   RUN locale-gen en_CA.UTF-8

   COPY ./default_locale /etc/default/locale

   RUN chmod 0755 /etc/default/locale

   ENV LC_ALL=en_CA.UTF-8

   ENV LANG=en_CA.UTF-8

   ENV LANGUAGE=en_CA.UTF-8

This thoroughly solved my issue when I built and run my Docker again, hopefully this solve your issue also.