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

I just had this problem, and Google led me here, so just to add to the general solutions here, this is what worked for me:

# 'value' contains the problematic data
unic = u''
unic += value
value = unic

I had this idea after reading Ned's presentation.

I don't claim to fully understand why this works, though. So if anyone can edit this answer or put in a comment to explain, I'll appreciate it.