printing unicode strings

[John Machin]

On Jul 25, 6:56 am, 7stud <bbxx789_0... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Can anyone tell me why I can print out the individual variables in the
> following code, but when I print them out combined into a single
> string, I get an error?
>
> symbol = u'ibm'
> price = u'4 \xbd'  # 4 1/2
>
> print "%s" % symbol
> print "%s" % price.encode("utf-8")
> print "%s %s" % (symbol, price.encode("utf-8") )
>
> --output:--
> ibm
> 4 1/2
> File "pythontest.py", line 6, in ?
>     print "%s %s" % (symbol, price.encode("utf-8") )
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position
> 2: ordinal not in range(128)

Because the first part is Unicode and the second part (after encoding
in utf8) is str.

It is trying to convert the second part to Unicode, using the default
codec (ascii), which of course must fail:

>>> price = u"4 \xbd"
>>> price.encode("utf8")
'4 \xc2\xbd'
>>>>>> price.encode("utf8").decode("ascii")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position
2: ordinal
not in range(128)
>>>