[Tutor] urllib.urlencode and unicode strings

[Jon Crump]

Dear all,

I've got a python list of data pulled via ElementTree from an xml file 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> that contains mixed str and unicode 
strings, like this:

[u'Jumi\xe9ge, Normandie', 'Farringdon, Hampshire', 'Ravensworth, 
Durham', 'La Suse, Anjou', 'Lions, Normandie', 'Lincoln, Lincolnshire', 
'Chelmsford, Essex', u'Ch\xe2telerault, Poitou', 'Bellencombre, 
Normandie'] etc.

trying to use geopy to geocode these placenames I get the following 
traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
   File "build/bdist.macosx-10.3-fat/egg/geopy/geocoders.py", line 327, in 
geocode
   File 
"/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/urllib.py", 
line 1242, in urlencode
     v = quote_plus(str(v))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe2' in 
position 2: ordinal not in range(128)

It appears that urlencode is choking on the unicode literals. Can anybody 
tell me how I can translate these strings into something like this: 
Ch%C3%A2tellerault.

No doubt this is obvious, but for a hopeless tyro like me, it is proving 
to be un-intuitive.

Thanks