UnicodeEncodeError: SOLVED

[Walter Hurry]

On Thu, 10 Oct 2013 01:47:52 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> On Wed, 09 Oct 2013 14:41:53 +0000, Walter Hurry wrote:
> 
>> Many thanks to those prepared to forgive my transgression in the
>> 'Goodbye' thread. I mentioned there that I was puzzled by a
>> UnicodeEncodeError, and said I would rise it as a separate thread.
>> 
>> However, via this link, I was able to resolve the issue myself:
>> 
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3224268/python-unicode-encode-error
> 
> I don't know what problem you had, and what your solution was, but the
> above link doesn't solve the problem, it just throws away data until the
> problem no longer appears, and never mind if it changes the semantics of
> the XML data.
> 
> Instead of throwing away data, the right solution is likely to be, stop
> trying to deal with XML yourself, and use a proper UTF-8 compliant XML
> library.
> 
> Or if you can't do that, at least open and read the XML file using UTF-8
> in the first place. In Python 3, you can pass a codec to open. In Python
> 2, you can use codecs.open instead of the built-in open.

All true, but in *this* case, simply discarding the offending character 
was sufficient. Thanks anyway.