How to write UTF-8 in a CSV file

Question

I am trying to create a text file in csv format out of a PyQt4 QTableWidget. I want to write the text with a UTF-8 encoding because it contains special characte

Answer 1

For me the UnicodeWriter class from Python 2 CSV module documentation didn't really work as it breaks the csv.writer.write_row() interface.

For example:

csv_writer = csv.writer(csv_file)
row = ['The meaning', 42]
csv_writer.writerow(row)

works, while:

csv_writer = UnicodeWriter(csv_file)
row = ['The meaning', 42]
csv_writer.writerow(row)

will throw AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'encode'.

As UnicodeWriter obviously expects all column values to be strings, we can convert the values ourselves and just use the default CSV module:

def to_utf8(lst):
    return [unicode(elem).encode('utf-8') for elem in lst]

...
csv_writer.writerow(to_utf8(row))

Or we can even monkey-patch csv_writer to add a write_utf8_row function - the exercise is left to the reader.