Right solution to unicode error?

Anders aschneiderman at asha.org
Wed Nov 7 17:17:42 EST 2012


I've run into a Unicode error, and despite doing some googling, I
can't figure out the right way to fix it. I have a Python 2.6 script
that reads my Outlook 2010 task list. I'm able to read the tasks from
Outlook and store them as a list of objects without a hitch.  But when
I try to print the tasks' subjects, one of the tasks is generating an
error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "outlook_tasks.py", line 66, in <module>
    my_tasks.dump_today_tasks()
  File "C:\Users\Anders\code\Task List\tasks.py", line 29, in
dump_today_tasks
    print task.subject
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in
position 42: ordinal not in range(128)

(where task.subject  was previously assigned the value of
task.Subject, aka the Subject property of an Outlook 2010 TaskItem)

>From what I understand from reading online, the error is telling me
that the subject line  contains an en dash and that Python is trying
to convert to ascii and failing (as it should).

Here's where I'm getting stuck.  In the code above I was just printing
the subject so I can see whether the script is working properly.
Ultimately what I want to do is parse the tasks I'm interested in and
then create an HTML file containing those tasks.  Given that, what's
the best way to fix this problem?

BTW, if there's a clear description of the best solution for this
particular problem – i.e., where I want to ultimately display the
results as HTML – please feel free to refer me to the link. I tried
reading a number of docs on the web but still feel pretty lost.

Thanks,
Anders



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