Question

I’m trying to parse a iTunes media library file, which is a plist file using python & plistlib. I wrote a simple python script:

import plistlib

plist = plistlib.readPlist('tunes.xml')
print(plist['Tracks'])

But when I try and run it an error occurs on line 3:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xe9' in position 21970: ordinal not in range(128)

I’ve tried to load the file with a utf-8 encoding convert to a bytearray and use plistlib.readPlistFromBytes but still the error occurs

Which is the best way to fix this?

Answer 1

Chances are the terminal session or console you’re running this in is not set to a UTF-8 compatible locale. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Locale for more info. For example, in US English locales:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8