[Tutor] changing unicode to ascii

[Peter Otten]

Benjamin Fishbein wrote:

> I was trying to write text to a file and got the following error:
> 
> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in
> position 5495: ordinal not in range(128)
> 
> I tried several things I found online, such as:
> text.encode("ascii", "ignore")
> which gave me the same error

Try saving text with

assert type(text) == unicode
with open(filename, "w") as f:
   f.write(text.encode("ascii", "ignore"))

If that fails please give the exact traceback. Don't paraphrase, use cut-
and-paste!

If the above works you can preserve your precious data including non-ascii 
characters with

import io

assert type(text) == unicode
with io.open(filename, "w") as f:
    f.write(text)