How do I automate the removal of all non-ascii characters from my code?

[Gary Herron]

On 09/12/2011 12:49 AM, Alec Taylor wrote:
> Good evening,
>
> I have converted ODT to HTML using LibreOffice Writer, because I want
> to convert from HTML to Creole using python-creole. Unfortunately I
> get this error: "File "Convert to Creole.py", line 17
> SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file Convert to Creole.py
> on line 18, but no encoding declared; see
> http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details".
>
> Unfortunately I can't post my document yet (it's a research paper I'm
> working on), but I'm sure you'll get the same result if you write up a
> document in LibreOffice Writer and add some End Notes.
>
> How do I automate the removal of all non-ascii characters from my code?
>
> Thanks for all suggestions,
>
> Alec Taylor



This question does not quite make sense.  The error message is 
complaining about a python file.  What does that file have to do with 
ODT to HTML conversion and LibreOffice?

The error message means the python file (wherever it came from) has a 
non-ascii character (as you noted), and so it needs something to tell it 
what such a character means.  (That what the encoding is.)

A comment like this in line 1 or 2 will specify an encoding:
   # -*- coding: <encoding name> -*-
but, we'll have to know more about the file "Convert to Creole.py" to 
guess what encoding name should be specified there.

You might try utf-8 or latin-1.