Degree symbol (UTF-8 > ASCII)

[Peter Clark]

Steven Taschuk <staschuk at telusplanet.net> wrote in message news:<mailman.1050606359.1431.python-list at python.org>...
> Quoth Peter Clark:
> > Steven Taschuk <staschuk at telusplanet.net> wrote in message news:<mailman.1050548247.26781.python-list at python.org>...

> And scale is a Unicode string, right?
    Only because the XML document has no specified encoding, so it
defaults to UTF-8, yes. But all the text is straight ASCII, except of
course for the inclusion of the degree symbol.

> I'd suggest doing all your string assembly with Unicode strings,
> and only encoding to ISO-8859-1 at the output stage.  Mixing the
> two kinds of strings is asking for trouble, as you have seen.
    You're right, of course. The list is sent to a simple function
that prints it to stdout; the following worked fine, and handles any
integers or floats that might otherwise cause an attribute error:

def printlist(w):
  for item in w:
    try:
      print item.encode('latin-1')
    except:
      print item

    Which is much nicer than having to mess with the strings as they
are added to the list. Thanks.