'ascii' codec error in beautifulsoup

Question

I am using beautifulsoup for scraping data from the html page. Till yesterday every thing was fine. But Now i am getting the error:

\'ascii\' codec can\'t en         


        

Answer 1

A wild stab in the dark: you're reading a page that doesn't explicitly declare an encoding and yet is not 7-bit ASCII?

Answer 2

A wild guess:

Try specifying the encoding of the page?

soup = BeautifulSoup(page, fromEncoding=<encoding of the page>)

This can also be a problem with the Python installation. If you print non-ASCII characters without BeautifulSoup, do you face the same problem? If yes, then you need to set the encoding:

import sys
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8") # or whatever you want the default encoding to be.