Encoding utf-8 to base64 with accents

Question

Hi, I have some data like this:

data1 = ['Agos', '30490349304']
data2 = ['Desir\xc3\xa9','9839483948']

I'm using an API that expects the data encoded in base64, so what I do is:

data = data1
string = base64.b64encode("Hi, %s! Your code is %s" % (data[0], data[0]))
myXMLRPCCall(string)

Which works fine with data1. With data2 the encoding goes ok, but then the XMLRPC returns an error, since it expects (from the API docs) only ISO-8859-1 (Latin1) characters.
My question is: how can I transform my string into Latin1 so that the API accepts it?

Answer 1

First make sure you're not confused about encodings, etc. Read, for example, this.

Then notice that the main problem isn't with the base64 encoding, but with the fact that you're trying to put byte string (normal string in Python 2.x) inside a Unicode string. I believe you can fix this by removing the "u" from the last string in your example code.

Answer 2

base64.b64encode("Hi, %s! Your code is %s" % (data[0].decode('utf8').encode('latin1'), data[0]))

Answer 3

This seem to work:

...

data = data2
base64.b64encode("Hi, %s! Your code is %s" % (data[0], data[0]))
# => 'SGksIERlc2lyw6khIFlvdXIgY29kZSBpcyBEZXNpcsOp'

# I can't test the XMLRPC parts, so this is just a hint ..
for_the_wire = base64.b64encode("Hi, %s! Your code is %s" % (data[0], data[0]))
latin_1_encoded = for_the_wire.encode('latin-1')

# send latin_1_encoded over the wire ..

Some python (2.X) unicode readings:

• http://evanjones.ca/python-utf8.html
• http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/unicode
• http://boodebr.org/main/python/all-about-python-and-unicode