Question

I have a long string that I want to encode to ascii. I’m doing:

s = s.encode('ascii', 'replace')

but I get:

'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 2646: ordinal not in range(128)

(I’ve also tried 'ignore' but it doesn’t help.)

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Your string is already encoded with some encoding. Before encoding it to ascii, you must decode it first.

Python is implicity trying to decode it (That’s why you get a UnicodeDecodeError not UnicodeEncodeError).

You can solve the problem by explicity decoding your bytestring (using the appropriate encoding) before trying to reencode it to ascii.

Example:

s = s.decode('some_encoding').encode('ascii', 'replace')

Use the correct encoding your string was encoded in first place, instead of 'some_encoding'.

You have to know which encoding a string is using before you can decode it. Where did you get the string from?