Writing Unicode text to a text file?

Question

I\'m pulling data out of a Google doc, processing it, and writing it to a file (that eventually I will paste into a Wordpress page).

It has some non-ASCII symbols. H

Answer 1

The file opened by codecs.open is a file that takes unicode data, encodes it in iso-8859-1 and writes it to the file. However, what you try to write isn't unicode; you take unicode and encode it in iso-8859-1 yourself. That's what the unicode.encode method does, and the result of encoding a unicode string is a bytestring (a str type.)

You should either use normal open() and encode the unicode yourself, or (usually a better idea) use codecs.open() and not encode the data yourself.