UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4'

Question

I permanently get the following error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4' in position 27: ordinal not in range(128)

I already tried

x.encode("ascii", "ignore")
x.encode("utf-8")
x.decode("utf-8")

However, nothing works.

`u'\xe4'.encode('ascii','ignore')` works fine for me. We need more context to see what the real problem is. — Mark Ransom, Oct 27 '14 at 17:14
#2 also "works" in that it produces a result w/o error; can't say if it is the desired result. — Scott Hunter, Oct 27 '14 at 17:16

score 13 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 28 '14 at 10:21

You have to discover in which encoding is this character at the source.

I guess this is ISO-8859-1 (european languages), in which case it's "ä", but you should check. It could also be cyrillic or greek.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1 for a complete list of characters in this encoding.

Using this information, you can ask Python to convert it :

In Python 2.7

>>> s = '\xe4'
>>> t = s.decode('iso-8859-1')
>>> print t
ä
>>> for c in t:
...   print ord(c)
...
228
>>> u = t.encode('utf-8')
>>> print u
ä
>>> for c in bytes(u):
...   print ord(c)
...
195
164

String t is internally encoded in ISO-8859-1 in Python. String u is internally encoded in UTF-8, and that character takes 2 bytes in UTF-8. Notice also that the print instruction "knows" how to display these different encodings.

Is there another solution for python3? – zypro Mar 12 '19 at 10:37 — zypro, Mar 12 '19 at 10:37

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4'

1 Answers1

Linked