python - UnicodeEncodeError when writing to a file

Question

I am trying to write some strings to a file (the strings have been given to me by the HTML parser BeautifulSoup).

I can use "print" to display them, but when I use file.write() I get the following error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'xa3' in position 6: ordinal not in range(128)

How can I parse this?

Answer 1

If I type 'python unicode' into Google, I get about 14 million results; the first is the official doc which describes the whole situation in excruciating detail; and the fourth is a more practical overview that will pretty much spoon-feed you an answer, and also make sure you understand what's going on.

You really do need to read and understand these sorts of overviews, however long they seem. There really isn't any getting around it. Text is hard. There is no such thing as "plain text", there hasn't been a reasonable facsimile for years, and there never really was, although we spent decades pretending there was. But Unicode is at least a standard.

You also should read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html .