Question

I’ve got following problem. If I’ll run my app in eclipse it works OK, but when I’ll run it in standalone debuger – I got following error:

UnicodeEncodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t encode character u’\u0144′ in position 7: ordinal not in range(128)

How can I fix it?

My code fragment:

x = x.replace("Ł", "L")

Answer 1

Guess, based on (insufficient) information provided:

You are running Python 2.x.

[Guess] x is a str object.

[Guess] Eclipse sets the default encoding to UTF-8.

The “standard debugger” sets the default encoding to ascii.

Result: splat.

Solution (standard operating procedure for working with Unicode):

• On input, convert all str objects to `unicode’.
• Work in Unicode.
• On output, encode all unicode objects using whatever encoding the
  consumer of the output is expecting.

Important update Actually if x was a UTF-8-encoded str object, you should have got a message like UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 7: etc etc.

Note that your actual error message says UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u0144' in position 7: etc etc This indicates that whatever it is complaining about is (a) a unicode object (b) at least 8 characters long. However you are saying in effect that x is not a unicode object (otherwise x.decode(‘utf8’) would fail) and the other two args of replace are only 1 character long. Consequently we have an impossibility.

To help resolve this:

print type(x), repr(x) # for Python 2.x
Lstroke = "Ł"
print type(Lstroke), repr(Lstroke)
y = x.replace(Lstroke, 'L')

and edit your question to show the actual code that you ran plus the full error message and the traceback.

By the way: u’\u0144′ is LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH ACUTE; does that info help at all?