Unicode in writing to a file

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Carbon Man wrote:

> Py 2.5
> Trying to write a string to a file.
> self.dataUpdate.write(u"\nentry."+node.tagName+ u" = " + cValue)
> cValue contains a unicode character. node.tagName is also a unicode string
> though it has no special characters in it.
> Getting the error:
> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\x93' in
> position 22: ordinal not in range(128)

Please don't confuse utf-8 with unicode. The former is an encoding of the
latter. Which is a crucial difference, as something being encoded (either
in utf-8 or any other encoding) needs to be *decoded* before being dealt
with in python as unicode-object.

Which is what's causing your troubles here. cValue is a *byte*string
containing some non-ascii-characters. 

If you are sure cValue is utf-8-encoded, you can do

u" = " + cValue.decode("utf-8")

to remedy the problem.

Diez