Pound sign problem

[Peter Otten]

David Shi via Python-list wrote:

> In the data set, pound sign escape appears:
> u'price_currency': u'\xa3', u'price_formatted': u'\xa3525,000',
> When using table.to_csv after importing pandas as pd, an error message
> persists as follows: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode
> character u'\xa3' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

The default encoding in Python 2 is ascii, and the pound sign is not part of 
that.

> Can anyone help?

Specify an alternative encoding, preferably UTF-8:

>>> import pandas
>>> df = pandas.DataFrame([[u"\xa3123"], [u"\xa3321"]], columns=["Price"])
>>> df
  Price
0  £123
1  £321

[2 rows x 1 columns]
>>> df.to_csv("tmp.csv", encoding="utf-8")
>>> 
$ cat tmp.csv
,Price
0,£123
1,£321
$