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pythonstringunicodeasciistringio

Python: How to get StringIO.writelines to accept unicode string?

I'm getting a 

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa3' in position 34: ordinal not in range(128)

on a string stored in 'a.desc' below as it contains the '£' character. It's stored in the underlying Google App Engine datastore as a unicode string so that's fine. The cStringIO.StringIO.writelines function is trying seemingly trying to encode it in ascii format:

result.writelines(['blahblah',a.desc,'blahblahblah'])

How do I instruct it to treat the encoding as unicode if that's the correct phrasing?

app engine runs on python 2.5

Solution

  • StringIO documentation:

    Unlike the memory files implemented by the StringIO module, those provided by [cStringIO] are not able to accept Unicode strings that cannot be encoded as plain ASCII strings.

    If possible, use StringIO instead of cStringIO.