Character encoding & the copyright symbol

[Philip Semanchuk]

On Aug 6, 2009, at 12:41 PM, Robert Dailey wrote:

> On Aug 6, 11:31 am, "Richard Brodie" <R.Bro... at rl.ac.uk> wrote:
>> "Robert Dailey" <rcdai... at gmail.com> wrote in message
>>
>> news:29ab0981-b95d-4435-91bd-a7a520419ada at b15g2000yqd.googlegroups.com 
>> ...
>>
>>> UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\xa9' in
>>> position 1650: character maps to <undefined>
>>
>>> The file is defined as ASCII.
>>
>> That's the problem: ASCII is a seven bit code. What you have is
>> actually ISO-8859-1 (or possibly Windows-1252).
>>
>> The different ISO-8859-n variants assign various characters to
>> to '\xa9'. Rather than being Western-European centric and assuming
>> ISO-8859-1 by default, Python throws an error when you stray
>> outside of strict ASCII.
>
> Thanks for the help guys. Sorry I left out code, I wasn't sure at the
> time if it would be helpful. Below is my code:
>
>
> #========================================================
> def GetFileContentsAsString( file ):
>   f = open( file, mode='r', encoding='cp1252' )
>   contents = f.read()
>   f.close()
>   return contents
>
> #========================================================
> def ReplaceVersion( file, version, regExps ):
>   #match = regExps[0].search( 'FILEVERSION 1,45332,2100,32,' )
>   #print( match.group() )
>   text = GetFileContentsAsString( file )
>   print( text )
>
>
> As you can see, I am trying to load the file with encoding 'cp1252'
> which, according to the python 3.1 docs, translates to windows-1252. I
> also tried 'latin_1', which translates to ISO-8859-1, but this did not
> work either. Am I doing something else wrong?


Are you getting the error when you read the file or when you  
print(text)?

As a side note, you should probably use something other than "file"  
for the parameter name in GetFileContentsAsString() since file() is a  
Python function.