b64encode and unicode problem

[Gabriel Rossetti]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to encode a string using b4encode and I get the following
error :

>>b64encode(u"Salut Pierre, comment ça va?")

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/base64.py", line 53, in b64encode
encoded = binascii.b2a_base64(s)[:-1]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe7' in
position 22: ordinal not in range(128)

If I remove the "u" infront of the string, it works. The problem is that
I in my program, the string is given to me un unicode/utf-8. I tried
several things, but I still get it, How can I get it to work, anybody
have any idea?

Thanks,
Gabriel

[Peter Otten]

Gabriel Rossetti wrote:

Hello everyone,

I am trying to encode a string using b4encode and I get the following
error :

>>b64encode(u"Salut Pierre, comment ça va?")

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/base64.py", line 53, in b64encode
encoded = binascii.b2a_base64(s)[:-1]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe7' in
position 22: ordinal not in range(128)

If I remove the "u" infront of the string, it works. The problem is that
I in my program, the string is given to me un unicode/utf-8. I tried
several things, but I still get it, How can I get it to work, anybody
have any idea?

>>base64.b64encode(u"Salut Pierre, comment ça va?".encode("utf8"))

'U2FsdXQgUGllcnJlLCBjb21tZW50IMOnYSB2YT8='

unicode is a sequence of codepoints with no predetermined representation as
a byte sequence. Therefore whenever you go from unicode to str you have to
decide upon an encoding. If you don't make that decision python assumes
ascii which will of course fail for non-ascii characters.

Peter

[Gabriel Rossetti]

Peter Otten wrote:

Gabriel Rossetti wrote:

>Hello everyone,

I am trying to encode a string using b4encode and I get the following
error :

> >>b64encode(u"Salut Pierre, comment ça va?")

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/base64.py", line 53, in b64encode
encoded = binascii.b2a_base64(s)[:-1]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe7' in
position 22: ordinal not in range(128)

If I remove the "u" infront of the string, it works. The problem is that
I in my program, the string is given to me un unicode/utf-8. I tried
several things, but I still get it, How can I get it to work, anybody
have any idea?

>>>base64.b64encode(u"Salut Pierre, comment ça va?".encode("utf8"))

'U2FsdXQgUGllcnJlLCBjb21tZW50IMOnYSB2YT8='

unicode is a sequence of codepoints with no predetermined representation as
a byte sequence. Therefore whenever you go from unicode to str you have to
decide upon an encoding. If you don't make that decision python assumes
ascii which will of course fail for non-ascii characters.

Peter

Ok, I get it better now, thanks!
Gabriel