regex - "UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character"

Question

I'm trying to pass big strings of random html through regular expressions and my Python 2.6 script is choking on this:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character

I traced it back to a trademark superscript on the end of this word: Protection? -- and I expect to encounter others like it in the future.

Is there a module to process non-ascii characters? or, what is the best way to handle/escape non-ascii stuff in python?

Thanks! Full error:

E
======================================================================
ERROR: test_untitled (__main__.Untitled)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:Python26Test2.py", line 26, in test_untitled
    ofile.write(Whois + '
')
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'u2122' in position 1005: ordinal not in range(128)

Full Script:

from selenium import selenium
import unittest, time, re, csv, logging

class Untitled(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.verificationErrors = []
        self.selenium = selenium("localhost", 4444, "*firefox", "http://www.BaseDomain.com/")
        self.selenium.start()
        self.selenium.set_timeout("90000")

    def test_untitled(self):
        sel = self.selenium
        spamReader = csv.reader(open('SubDomainList.csv', 'rb'))
        for row in spamReader:
            sel.open(row[0])
            time.sleep(10)
            Test = sel.get_text("//html/body/div/table/tbody/tr/td/form/div/table/tbody/tr[7]/td")
            Test = Test.replace(",","")
            Test = Test.replace("
", "")
            ofile = open('TestOut.csv', 'ab')
            ofile.write(Test + '
')
            ofile.close()

    def tearDown(self):
        self.selenium.stop()
        self.assertEqual([], self.verificationErrors)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    unittest.main()

Answer 1

You're trying to convert unicode to ascii in "strict" mode:

>>> help(str.encode)
Help on method_descriptor:

encode(...)
    S.encode([encoding[,errors]]) -> object

    Encodes S using the codec registered for encoding. encoding defaults
    to the default encoding. errors may be given to set a different error
    handling scheme. Default is 'strict' meaning that encoding errors raise
    a UnicodeEncodeError. Other possible values are 'ignore', 'replace' and
    'xmlcharrefreplace' as well as any other name registered with
    codecs.register_error that is able to handle UnicodeEncodeErrors.

You probably want something like one of the following:

s = u'Protection?'

print s.encode('ascii', 'ignore')    # removes the ?
print s.encode('ascii', 'replace')   # replaces with ?
print s.encode('ascii','xmlcharrefreplace') # turn into xml entities
print s.encode('ascii', 'strict')    # throw UnicodeEncodeErrors