UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

I\'m working on a Python script that uses the scissor character (9986 - ✂) and I\'m trying to port my code to Mac, but I\'m running into this error.

The scissor char

Answer 1

test_io_encoding.py output suggests that you should change your locale settings e.g., set LANG=en_US.UTF-8.

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The first error might be due to you are trying to decode a string that is already Unicode. Python 2 tries to encode it using a default character encoding ('ascii') before decoding it using (possibly) different character encoding. The error happens on the encode step:

>>> u"\u2702".decode() # Python 2
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2702' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

It looks like you are running your script using Python 2 instead of Python 3. You would get:

>>> "\u2702".decode() # Python 3
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'

different error otherwise.

Just drop the .decode() call:

print("|\t {0} PySnipt'd {0} \t|".format(snipper))

The second issue is due to printing a Unicode string into a pipe:

$ python3 -c'print("\u2702")'
✂
$ python3 -c'print("\u2702")' | cat
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u2702' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Set appropriate for your purpose PYTHONIOENCODING environment variable:

$ PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 python3 -c'print("\u2702")' | cat
✂

---

the terminal is just displaying this: | b'\xe2\x9c\x82' PySnipt'd b'\xe2\x9c\x82' |

If snipper is a bytes object then leave the snipper.decode() calls.

$ python3 -c"print(b'\xe2\x9c\x82'.decode())"
✂
$ python3 -c"print(b'\xe2\x9c\x82'.decode())" | cat
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u2702' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

The fix is the same:

$ PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 python3 -c"print(b'\xe2\x9c\x82'.decode())" | cat
✂