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Question

Hi, how should I write "mąka" in Python without an expection? I've tried var= u"mąka", var= unicode("mąka") etc... nothing helps :/

Answer 1

What exception are you getting?

You might try saving your source code file as UTF-8, and putting this at the top of the file:

# coding=utf-8

That tells Python that the file’s saved as UTF-8.

Answer 2

This code works for me, saving the file as UTF-8:

v = u"mąka"
print repr(v)

The output I get is:

u'm\u0105ka'

Please copy and paste the exact error you are getting. If you are getting this error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character ... in position ...: character maps to <undefined>

Then you are trying to output the character somewhere that does not support UTF-8 (e.g. your shell's character encoding is set to something other than UTF-8).

Answer 3

I have coding definition in first line in my document, and still I've got that exception:

'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xb1 in position 0: unexpected code byte

Answer 4

The # -- coding: -- line must specify the encoding the source file is saved in. This error message:

'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xb1 in position 0: unexpected code byte

indicates you aren't saving the source file in UTF-8. You can save your source file in any encoding that supports the characters you are using in the source code, just make sure you know what it is and have an appropriate coding line.

Answer 5

Save the following 2 lines into write_mako.py:

# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
open(u"mąka.txt", 'w').write("mąka\n")

Run:

$ python write_mako.py

mąka.txt file that contains the word mąka should be created in the current directory.

If it doesn't work then you can use chardet to detect actual encoding of the file (see chardet example usage):

import chardet

print chardet.detect(open('write_mako.py', 'rb').read())

In my case it prints:

{'confidence': 0.75249999999999995, 'encoding': 'utf-8'}