[Tutor] ascii codec cannot encode character

[Dave Angel]

On 01/28/2011 08:02 AM, Alex Hall wrote:
> On 1/28/11, Dave Angel<davea at ieee.org>  wrote:
>> On 01/-10/-28163 02:59 PM, Alex Hall wrote:
>>> <snip>
>>> I tried both of those and got a different error. I have since fixed it
>>> so I no longer have the exact text, but it was something about not
>>> supporting convertion from unicode. I finally ended up doing this:
>>> self.title�ta.find("title").text.encode("utf-8")
>>> and it seems happy enough, though I get odd characters above 128. I
>>> suppose it is better than a traceback, and I suspect I just have the
>>> wrong character set. Still, I found it very odd that unicode(string,
>>> errors=eplace') threw an exception.
>>>>
>>
>> Well as I said before it would certainly have helped if you had quoted
>> the entire error in the first place.  That includes the stack trace.
>>
>> But now that it's gone, you could answer some of the other questions.
>>
>> How are you using this  self.title value?  It's apparently a byte
>> string, and you say it displays incorrectly.  But what device are you
>> sending it to?  Your console on Windows, or your messagebox on wxPython?
>>    Or where?
> For the moment it will be a Win7x64 console or a .txt file on the same
> machine (this is py2.7, but 2.6 is also installed). Eventually, as
> this is an api wrapper, it will go to wx for me, and probably other
> gui libraries if anyone else feels like using it.
>>
>> DaveA
>>
>
>
So clearly, the Win7x26 console on your machine doesn't support utf-8. 
As Peter said, you could inspect sys.stdout (that's what print uses) to 
see what encoding it specifies.

Note that if you may be sending the data to various places, that may 
have different support, you probably don't want to encode it till it's 
know where it's going.  So you might leave self.title as unicode, but 
when you actually print it, encode it in the print statement.  And when 
you write it to a file, you encode it separately, and maybe differently. 
  And when you use it in wx, you pick a third way.

Does anybody know what encodings the Win7x64 console can be made to 
support?  And how to tell what it's configured for, for a given country?

DaveA