UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)

You need to read the Python Unicode HOWTO. This error is the very first example.

Basically, stop using str to convert from unicode to encoded text / bytes.

Instead, properly use .encode() to encode the string:

p.agent_info = u' '.join((agent_contact, agent_telno)).encode('utf-8').strip()

or work entirely in unicode.

This is a classic python unicode pain point! Consider the following:

a = u'bats\u00E0'
print a
 => batsà

All good so far, but if we call str(a), let's see what happens:

str(a)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe0' in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)

Oh dip, that's not gonna do anyone any good! To fix the error, encode the bytes explicitly with .encode and tell python what codec to use:

a.encode('utf-8')
 => 'bats\xc3\xa0'
print a.encode('utf-8')
 => batsà

Voil\u00E0!

The issue is that when you call str(), python uses the default character encoding to try and encode the bytes you gave it, which in your case are sometimes representations of unicode characters. To fix the problem, you have to tell python how to deal with the string you give it by using .encode('whatever_unicode'). Most of the time, you should be fine using utf-8.

For an excellent exposition on this topic, see Ned Batchelder's PyCon talk here: http://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html

I found elegant work around for me to remove symbols and continue to keep string as string in follows:

yourstring = yourstring.encode('ascii', 'ignore').decode('ascii')

A subtle problem causing even print to fail is having your environment variables set wrong, eg. here LC_ALL set to "C". In Debian they discourage setting it: Debian wiki on Locale

$ echo $LANG
en_US.utf8
$ echo $LC_ALL 
C
$ python -c "print (u'voil\u00e0')"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe0' in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)
$ export LC_ALL='en_US.utf8'
$ python -c "print (u'voil\u00e0')"
voilà
$ unset LC_ALL
$ python -c "print (u'voil\u00e0')"
voilà

I've actually found that in most of my cases, just stripping out those characters is much simpler:

s = mystring.decode('ascii', 'ignore')

For me, what worked was:

BeautifulSoup(html_text,from_encoding="utf-8")

Hope this helps someone.

Simple helper functions found here.

def safe_unicode(obj, *args):
    """ return the unicode representation of obj """
    try:
        return unicode(obj, *args)
    except UnicodeDecodeError:
        # obj is byte string
        ascii_text = str(obj).encode('string_escape')
        return unicode(ascii_text)

def safe_str(obj):
    """ return the byte string representation of obj """
    try:
        return str(obj)
    except UnicodeEncodeError:
        # obj is unicode
        return unicode(obj).encode('unicode_escape')

The problem is that you're trying to print a unicode character, but your terminal doesn't support it.

You can try installing language-pack-en package to fix that:

sudo apt-get install language-pack-en

which provides English translation data updates for all supported packages (including Python). Install different language package if necessary (depending which characters you're trying to print).

On some Linux distributions it's required in order to make sure that the default English locales are set-up properly (so unicode characters can be handled by shell/terminal). Sometimes it's easier to install it, than configuring it manually.

Then when writing the code, make sure you use the right encoding in your code.

For example:

open(foo, encoding='utf-8')

If you've still a problem, double check your system configuration, such as:

• your locale file (/etc/default/locale), which should have e.g.

  LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

• value of LANG/LC_CTYPE in shell

Demonstrating the problem and solution in fresh VM.

1. Initialize and provision the VM (e.g. using vagrant):

   vagrant init ubuntu/vivid64; vagrant up; vagrant ssh

2. Printing unicode characters (such as trade mark sign like ™):

   $ python -c 'print(u"\u2122");'
   Traceback (most recent call last):
     File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
   UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2122' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

3. Now installing language-pack-en:

   $ sudo apt-get -y install language-pack-en
   The following extra packages will be installed:
     language-pack-en-base
   Generating locales...
     en_GB.UTF-8... /usr/sbin/locale-gen: done
   Generation complete.

4. Now problem is solved:

   $ python -c 'print(u"\u2122");'
   ™

I just had this problem, and Google led me here, so just to add to the general solutions here, this is what worked for me:

# 'value' contains the problematic data
unic = u''
unic += value
value = unic

I had this idea after reading Ned's presentation.

I don't claim to fully understand why this works, though. So if anyone can edit this answer or put in a comment to explain, I'll appreciate it.