UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character when trying a HTTP POST in Python

Question

Hi there,

I'm trying to do a HTTP POST with a unicode string (u'\xe4\xf6\xfc') as a paremter in Python, but I receive the following error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character

This is to the code used to make the HTTP POST (with httplib2)

 http = httplib2.Http()  
 userInfo = [('Name', u'\xe4\xf6\xfc')]
 data = urlencode(userInfo)

 resp, content = http.request(url, 'POST', body=data)

Any ideas on how to solve this?

Answer 1

You cannot POST Python Unicode objects directly. You should encode it as a UTF-8 string first:

name = u'\xe4\xf6\xfc'.encode('utf-8')
userInfo = [('Name', name)]