Python: write a list with non-ASCII characters to a text file

Question

I\'m using python 3.4 and I\'m trying to write a list of names to a text file. The list is as follows:

my_list = [\'Dejan Živković\',\'Gregg Berhalter\',\'James          


        

Answer 1

The issue is that the file is getting openned with ascii encoding (which might be what is returned by locale.getpreferredencoding() for your environment). You can try openning with the correct encoding (maybe utf-8) . Also, you should use with statement so that it handles closing the file for you.

For Python 2.x , you can use codecs.open() function instead of open() -

with codecs.open("/Users/.../Desktop/Name_Python.txt", "w",encoding='utf-8') as file:
    file.writelines( "%s\n" % item for item in my_list )

For Python 3.x , you can use the built-in function open() , which supports encoding argument. Example -

with open("/Users/.../Desktop/Name_Python.txt", "w",encoding='utf-8') as file:
    file.writelines( "%s\n" % item for item in my_list )

Answer 2

try this:

>>> my_list = ['Dejan Živković','Gregg Berhalter','James Stevens','Mike Windischmann' ,'Gunnar Heiðar Þorvaldsson']
>>> f = open("/Users/.../Desktop/Name_Python.txt", "w")
>>> for x in my_list:
...     f.write("{}\n".format(x))
... 
>>> f.close()

Answer 3

Best method would be to play with unicodes

my_list = [u'Dejan \u017Divkovi\u0107','Gregg Berhalter','James Stevens','Mike Windischmann'
           ,u'Gunnar Hei\u00F0ar \u00FEorvaldsson']
print my_list[0]

Output:Dejan Živković

Answer 4

Try using UTF-8 encoding. You can start by putting # -- coding: utf-8 -- at the top of your .py file.