Unicode (UTF-8) reading and writing to files in Python

Question

I\'m having some brain failure in understanding reading and writing text to a file (Python 2.4).

# The string, which has an a-acute in it.
ss = u\'Capit\\xe1         


        

Answer 1

I was trying to parse iCal using Python 2.7.9:

from icalendar import Calendar

But I was getting:

 Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "ical.py", line 92, in parse
    print "{}".format(e[attr])
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in position 7: ordinal not in range(128)

and it was fixed with just:

print "{}".format(e[attr].encode("utf-8"))

(Now it can print liké á böss.)