UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character in python writing to csv

Question

My code is generating an exception when there are special characters. How can I resolve the issue? My code:

with open((cmd_args.directory_path+"/"+collectn+"_"+dt.strftime(
        dt.today(), '%m-%d-%y_%H:%M:%S')+".psv"), 'w') as csvfile:


writer = csv.DictWriter(csvfile,delimiter=cmd_args.delimiter, fieldnames=fieldnames, extrasaction='ignore')
writer.writeheader()
for x in collection_filter_items:
    writer.writerow(x)
csvfile.close()

I am getting the following exception:

    Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./export.py", line 150, in <module>
    main(sys.argv[1:])
  File "./export.py", line 140, in main
    writer.writerow(x)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/csv.py", line 153, in writerow
    return self.writer.writerow(self._dict_to_list(rowdict))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xae' in position 59: ordinal not in range(128)