How to encode and decode from spanish in python

Question

I have the following code written in python 2.7

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-    
import sys

_string = "años luz detrás"
print _string.encode("utf-8")

this throws the following error:

print _string.encode("utf-8")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

Any help appreciated, thanks in advance

possible duplicate of [Python - 'ascii' codec can't decode byte](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9644099/python-ascii-codec-cant-decode-byte) — Bleeding Fingers, Jan 05 '14 at 15:15

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 05 '14 at 15:12

9

Add u before the "

>>> _string = u"años luz detrás"
>>> print _string.encode("utf-8")
años luz detrás

This would do.

answered Jan 05 '14 at 15:12

Bleeding Fingers

6,993
7
46
74

score 4 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

In Python 2 a string literal "" creates a bytestring. Then you call .encode("utf-8") on a bytestring, Python tries first to decode it into Unicode string using a default character encoding (ascii) before executing .encode("utf-8").

u"" creates Unicode string. It will fix the UnicodeDecodeError as @Bleeding Fingers suggested.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-    
print u"años luz detrás"

It might lead to UnicodeEncodeError if stdout is redirected. Set PYTHONIOENCODING environment variable in this case.

How to encode and decode from spanish in python

2 Answers2

Linked