'ascii' codec can't encode character at position * ord not in range(128)

Question

There are a few threads on stackoverflow, but i couldn\'t find a valid solution to the problem as a whole.

I have collected huge sums of textual data from the urllib rea

Answer 1

Your data is unicode data. To write that to a file, use .encode():

text = text.encode('ascii', 'ignore')

but that would remove anything that isn't ASCII. Perhaps you wanted to encode to a more suitable encoding, like UTF-8, instead?

You may want to read up on Python and Unicode:

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky

• The Python Unicode HOWTO

• Pragmatic Unicode by Ned Batchelder