Error while importing Wikipedia using pip

Question

I'm using Python 2.7 and trying to work with the following code

import wikipedia

input = raw_input("Question: ")
print wikipedia.summary(input)

I see this error when the code is run:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "wik.py", line 5, in print wikipedia.summary(input) File "C:\Anaconda2\lib\encodings\cp437.py", line 12, in encode return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_map) UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 38: character maps to undefined

How can I fix this? Thanks in advance.

Have you tried `print wikipedia.summary(input).encode('utf8')`? — Rodrigo Leite, Jul 26 '17 at 17:10

mjmccolgan · Answer 1 · 2017-07-26T18:01:55.230

1

Python 2 defaults to ASCII, which only maps characters between \u0000 and \u007F1. You need to use a different encoding in order to properly get this character (\u2013 is a long dash) and many others outside of ASCII.

Using UTF-8 should work for you, and I believe this print statement will properly output text:

print wikipedia.summary(input).encode("utf8")

For more information on this, check this similar question: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 3 2: ordinal not in range(128).

edited Jul 26 '17 at 18:01

answered Jul 26 '17 at 17:48

mjmccolgan

27
5

Yes it worked. Thanks. Will the statement work in Python 3? – DEV Bob Jul 26 '17 at 18:11
The only thing you need to change is using parentheses with print (syntax difference between Python 2 and 3). – mjmccolgan Jul 26 '17 at 18:14

Error while importing Wikipedia using pip

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