UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

I\'m having problems dealing with unicode characters from text fetched from different web pages (on different sites). I am using BeautifulSoup.

The problem is that

Answer 1

Simple helper functions found here.

def safe_unicode(obj, *args):
    """ return the unicode representation of obj """
    try:
        return unicode(obj, *args)
    except UnicodeDecodeError:
        # obj is byte string
        ascii_text = str(obj).encode('string_escape')
        return unicode(ascii_text)

def safe_str(obj):
    """ return the byte string representation of obj """
    try:
        return str(obj)
    except UnicodeEncodeError:
        # obj is unicode
        return unicode(obj).encode('unicode_escape')