Python ASCII codec can't encode character error during write to CSV

Question

I\'m not entirely sure what I need to do about this error. I assumed that it had to do with needing to add .encode(\'utf-8\'). But I\'m not entirely sure if that\'s what I n

Answer 1

Python 2.x CSV library is broken. You have three options. In order of complexity:

1. Edit: See below Use the fixed library https://github.com/jdunck/python-unicodecsv (pip install unicodecsv). Use as a drop-in replacement - Example:

   with open("myfile.csv", 'rb') as my_file:    
       r = unicodecsv.DictReader(my_file, encoding='utf-8')
   

2. Read the CSV manual regarding Unicode: https://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html (See examples at the bottom)

3. Manually encode each item as UTF-8:

   for cell in row.findAll('td'):
       text = cell.text.replace('[','').replace(']','')
       list_of_cells.append(text.encode("utf-8"))
   

Edit, I found python-unicodecsv is also broken when reading UTF-16. It complains about any 0x00 bytes.

Instead, use https://github.com/ryanhiebert/backports.csv, which more closely resembles Python 3 implementation and uses io module..

Install:

pip install backports.csv

Usage:

from backports import csv
import io

with io.open(filename, encoding='utf-8') as f:
    r = csv.reader(f):