Encoding CSV lists in python

Question

I need some help with the encoding of a list. I'm new in python, sorry. First, I'm using Python 2.7.3

I have two lists (entidad & valores), and I need to get them encoded or something of that.

My code:

import urllib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import csv

sock = urllib.urlopen("http://www.fatm.com.es/Datos_Equipo.asp?Cod=01HU0010")
htmlSource = sock.read()
sock.close()
soup = BeautifulSoup(htmlSource)

form = soup.find("form", {'id': "FORM1"})
table = form.find("table")

entidad = [item.text.strip() for item in table.find_all('td')]

valores = [item.get('value') for item in form.find_all('input')]
valores.remove('Imprimir')
valores.remove('Cerrar')
header = entidad
values = valores

print values

out = open('tomate.csv', 'w')

w = csv.writer(out)
w.writerow(header)
w.writerow(values)
out.close()

the log: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character

any ideas? Thanks in advance!!

Did you google your error message? Here's the top result: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9942594/unicodeencodeerror-ascii-codec-cant-encode-character-u-xa0-in-position-20 — amos, Feb 28 '14 at 16:04
I always google this simple things, but I couldn't understand well, sorry. — juasmilla, Feb 28 '14 at 16:13

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 28 '14 at 16:06

2

You should encode your data to utf-8 manually, csv.writer didnt do it for you:

w.writerow([s.encode("utf-8") for s in header])
w.writerow([s.encode("utf-8") for s in values])
#w.writerow(header)
#w.writerow(values)

answered Feb 28 '14 at 16:06

ndpu

22,225
6
54
69

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 28 '14 at 16:15

This appears to be the same type of problem as had been found here UnicodeEncodeError in csv writer in Python

UnicodeEncodeError in csv writer in Python
Today I was writing a program that generates a csv file after some processing. But I got the following error while trying on some test data:

writer.writerow(csv_li) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xbf' in position 5: ordinal not in range(128)

I looked into the documentation of csv module in Python and found a class named UnicodeWriter. So I changed my code to

writer = UnicodeWriter(open("filename.csv", "wb"))

Then I tried to run it again. It got rid of the previous UnicodeEncodeError but got into another error.

self.writer.writerow([s.encode("utf-8") for s in row]) AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'encode'

So, before writing the list, I had to change every value to string.

row = [str(item) for item in row]

I think this line can be added in the writerow function of UnicodeWriter class.

Encoding CSV lists in python

2 Answers2