0

I am receiving the below error with the dash character "-"

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 38: ordinal not in range(128)

I have tried using the following: skills.encode('utf-8') but I still get the error. Below is my code in which I am trying to write to csv.

 writer.writerow([name.encode('utf-8'), heading.encode('utf-8'), location.encode('utf-8'), education.encode('utf-8'), summary, currentRole, allRoles, companiesFollowed, groups, skills.encode('utf-8')])
Improve this question
6
  • only you could say what that character is supposed to be. Commented Apr 29, 2019 at 1:53
  • The character is the dash Commented Apr 29, 2019 at 1:56
  • 1
    ah, not just a normal - dash, but an n-dash fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2013/index.htm. Yeah you can't represent that in ASCII. What would you like to be there instead? Commented Apr 29, 2019 at 1:59
  • Just a regular dash if possible. I don't know the difference between a dash and an en dash. Commented Apr 29, 2019 at 2:01
  • if you use Python3 that's what you'll get (and you can skip the encodes). If you don't, you'll have to learn a whole lot more than you know now about Unicode and what a Unicode code point means. I'm not aware of any function that can just know that you want an n-dash to be a hyphen. You could make your own string replacement using string.maketrans and str.translate but that's about it. Commented Apr 29, 2019 at 2:08

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

You can specify one of a number of settings to str.encode under the errors keyword. More info can be found in the docs but I'd recommend you use the 'replace' error handler.

writer.writerow([name.encode('utf-8', errors='replace'), heading.encode('utf-8', errors='replace'), location.encode('utf-8', errors='replace'), education.encode('utf-8', errors='replace'), summary, currentRole, allRoles, companiesFollowed, groups, skills.encode('utf-8', errors='replace')])

This will end up making a bytes object with a ? in place of each unencodable code point.

Improve this answer
Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

Thanks for your response @Adam. That didnt work unfortunately I got this error : skills.encode('utf-8', errors='replace')]) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 38: ordinal not in range(128)
@dcraven I can't reproduce that result. What version of Python are you running?

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.