Question

I’ve got a dictionary that has some Unicode characters, and the console I’m using is set to print UTF-8, but when I try to print the key from the dictionary, I’m getting an error.

import sys
print u'\xc9'
print sys.stdout.encoding

unicode_dict = {u'a': 3,
                u'b': 4,
                u'c': 5,
                u'\xc9': 1,
                u'\xc8': 2}

for k, v in unicode_dict.iteritems():
    print "{0}: {1}".format(k, v)

When I run this code, I get the following error:

É
UTF-8
a: 3
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "unicodetest.py", line 12, in <module>
    print "{0}: {1}".format(k, v)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xc9' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

What is going on here? Why is print giving me that error?

Answer 1

This line:

print "{0}: {1}".format(k, v)

means you’re trying to convert the string to ASCII, as the error shows. Don’t do that: either keep it in unicode, and get the output to convert it as necessary:

print u"{0}: {1}".format(k, v)

or convert it explicitly using something that supports those characters, probably utf-8:

print "{0}: {1}".format(k.encode('utf-8'), v)