UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: oridinal not in range(128)

[Fredrik Lundh]

Doru-Catalin Togea wrote:

> The same code fails when "tmplText" comes from an XML files which contains
> norwegian characters (latin-1 extension), like ø, in the data, not
> in the tags, with the following error message:
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> File "./python/genh1.py", line 335, in ?
> f.write(tmplText)
> UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: oridinal not in range(128)

you're trying to write unicode strings to an 8-bit device,
without telling Python what encoding to use.

instead of guessing what to do with non-ASCII characters,
Python throws an exception.

> What kind of strings do write() and print() handle? Hopefully I can
> convert my strings to that type.

try:

    f.write(tmplText.encode(encoding))

where encoding is the encoding used by your terminal (most
likely "iso-8859-1", aka latin 1).

for some additional notes, see:

    http://effbot.org/zone/unicode-objects.htm
    http://www.python.org/doc/current/tut/node5.html (section 3.1.3)
    http://www.reportlab.com/i18n/python_unicode_tutorial.html

and

    http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0100.html

</F>