UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in position 99: ordinal not in range(128)

[Francach]

Hi,

I don't know what I'm doing wrong here.
I''m using Python 2.4 and py2exe. I get he following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "notegui.pyc", line 34, in OnClose
File "brain.pyc", line 61, in setNote
File "points.pyc", line 151, in setNote
File "point.pyc", line 100, in writeNote
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in
position 99: ordinal not in range(128)
The piece of code involved is:

noteFileObj = open(noteFile, "wb")
noteFileObj.write(note)
noteFileObj.close()
I would've thought that the 'b' option meant I can write any binary
code I like to the file,
but that's not so?

Thanks for any tips,
Martin.

[Fredrik Lundh]

Francach wrote:

I don't know what I'm doing wrong here.
I''m using Python 2.4 and py2exe. I get he following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "notegui.pyc", line 34, in OnClose
File "brain.pyc", line 61, in setNote
File "points.pyc", line 151, in setNote
File "point.pyc", line 100, in writeNote
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in
position 99: ordinal not in range(128)

The piece of code involved is:

noteFileObj = open(noteFile, "wb")
noteFileObj.write(note)
noteFileObj.close()

I would've thought that the 'b' option meant I can write any binary
code I like to the file, but that's not so?

since you're getting a UnicodeEncodeError, the "note" object is probably
a Unicode string, not a "binary code".

to write Unicode strings to a file, you need to decide what encoding to
use, and encode the string on the way out. e.g.

nodeFileObj.write(note.encode("utf-8"))

to write it as a UTF-8 string.

</F>

[Diez B. Roggisch]

> I would've thought that the 'b' option meant I can write any binary

code I like to the file,
but that's not so?

You can. But if you write a unicode-object (wich is an abstract data
type with no byte representation), it has to be converted to a string -
which you have to do either explicit. Or if you don't do it - it ill be
done automatically, using the system default encoding. Which is ascii,
most of the time.

So do

noteFileObj.write(note.encode("utf-8"))

Regards,

Diez