[Tutor] Encode problem

[Kent Johnson]

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Sander Sweers <sander.sweers at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/5/4 Kent Johnson <kent37 at tds.net>:
>> str.decode() converts a string to a unicode object. unicode.encode()
>> converts a unicode object to a (byte) string. Both of these functions
>> take the encoding as a parameter. When Python is given a string, but
>> it needs a unicode object, or vice-versa, it will encode or decode as
>> needed. The encode or decode will use the system default encoding,
>> which as you have discovered is ascii. If the data being encoded or
>> decoded contains non-ascii characters, you get an error that you are
>> familiar with. These errors indicate that you are not correctly
>> handling encoded data.
>
> Very interesting read Kent!
>
> So if I get it correctly you are saying the join() is joining strings
> of str and unicode type? Then would it help to add a couple of "print
> type(the_string), the_string" before the .join() help finding which
> string is not unicode or is unicode where it shouldn't?

I think that was the original problem though I haven't seen enough
code to be sure. The current problem is (I tihnk) that he is writing
encoded data to a codec writer that expects unicode input, so it is
trying to convert str to unicode (so it can convert back to str!) and
failing.

Kent