Question

I’m trying to write some data to a file using pystache. The data comes from a csv file which was exported from a google docs spreadsheet. When writing the file using the pystache template I’m getting this error:

UnicodeDecodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte…

According to some other questions here on Stackoverflow I should use a .decode('utf-8') but I’m still getting the same error.

datafile = "../data.csv"
renderer = pystache.Renderer()

f=open('sample.html','w')
templateHash={}
items = []

with open(datafile, 'rb') as csvfile:
    datareader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',')
    for row in datareader:
        item = {'name' : row[2].decode('utf-8')}
        items.append(item)

templateHash['lines'] = items
f.write(renderer.render_path('sample.mustache', templateHash))
f.close

Here the full traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "parsetable.py", line 15, in <module>
    f.write(renderer.render_path('sample.mustache', templateHash))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xfc' in position 750: ordinal     not in range(128)
[Finished in 0.3s with exit code 1]

Answer 1

f = codecs.open('sample.html', 'w', encoding='utf-8')

Or better yet, use with.