How do I encode and decode this data to write to a file?

[cl at isbd.net]

I am debugging some code that creates a static HTML gallery from a
directory hierarchy full of images. It's this package:-
    https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Gallery2.py/2.0


It's basically working and does pretty much what I want so I'm happy to
put some effort into it and fix things.

The problem I'm currently chasing is that it can't cope with directory
names that have accented characters in them, it fails when it tries to
write the HTML that creates the page with the thumbnails on.

The code that's failing is:-

        raw = os.path.join(directory, self.getNameNoExtension()) + ".html"
        file = open(raw, "w")
        file.write("".join(html).encode('utf-8'))
        file.close()

The variable html is a list containing the lines of HTML to write to the
file.  It fails when it contains accented characters (an é in this
case).  Here's the traceback:-

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gallery/galleries.py", line 41, in run self._recurse()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gallery/galleries.py", line 272, in _recurse os.path.walk(self.props["sourcedir"], self.processDir, None)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/posixpath.py", line 246, in walk walk(name, func, arg) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/posixpath.py", line 246, in walk walk(name, func, arg)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/posixpath.py", line 246, in walk walk(name, func, arg) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/posixpath.py", line 238, in walk func(arg, top, names)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gallery/galleries.py", line 263, in processDir self.createGallery()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gallery/galleries.py", line 215, in createGallery self.picturemanager.createPictureHTMLs(self.footer)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gallery/picturemanager.py", line 84, in createPictureHTMLs curPic.createPictureHTML(self.galleryDirectory, self.getStylesheet(), self.fullsize, footer)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gallery/picture.py", line 361, in createPictureHTML file.write("".join(html).encode('utf-8')) UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 783: ordinal not in range(128)



If I understand correctly the encode() is saying that it can't
understand the data in the html because there's a character 0xc3 in it.
I *think* this means that the é is encoded in UTF-8 already in the
incoming data stream (should be as my system is wholly UTF-8 as far as I
know and I created the directory name).

So how do I change the code so I don't get the error?  Do I just
decode() the data first and then encode() it?

-- 
Chris Green