Python : UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character

Question

I am at a scenario where I call api and based on the results from api I call database for each record that I in api. My api call return strings and when I make the database

Answer 1

If you need Latin-1 encoding, you have several options to get rid of the en-dash or other code points above 255 (characters not included in Latin-1):

>>> u = u'hello\u2013world'
>>> u.encode('latin-1', 'replace')    # replace it with a question mark
'hello?world'
>>> u.encode('latin-1', 'ignore')     # ignore it
'helloworld'

Or do your own custom replacements:

>>> u.replace(u'\u2013', '-').encode('latin-1')
'hello-world'

If you aren't required to output Latin-1, then UTF-8 is a common and preferred choice. It is recommended by the W3C and nicely encodes all Unicode code points:

>>> u.encode('utf-8')
'hello\xe2\x80\x93world'