CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxmlcharacter-encodingminidom
user574435
user574435

Reputation: 143

In python writing from XML to CSV, encoding error

I am trying to convert an XML file to CSV, but the encoding of the XML ("ISO-8859-1") apparently contains characters that are not in the ascii codec which Python uses to write rows.

I get the error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "convert_folder_to_csv_PLAYER.py", line 139, in <module>
    xml2csv_PLAYER(filename)
  File "convert_folder_to_csv_PLAYER.py", line 121, in xml2csv_PLAYER
    fout.writerow(row)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)

I have tried opening the file as follows: dom1 = parse(input_filename.encode( "utf-8" ) )

and I have tried replacing the \xe1 character in each row before it is written. Any suggestions?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2501

Answers (1)

nosklo
nosklo

Reputation: 223062

The xml parser returns unicode objects. That's a good thing. Thing is, csv module can't deal with them.

You could encode each unicode string returned by the xml parser before handing to the csv writer, but a better idea is to use this csv UnicodeWriter recipe from the official docs of the csv module:

import csv, codecs, cStringIO

class UnicodeWriter:
    """
    A CSV writer which will write rows to CSV file "f",
    which is encoded in the given encoding.
    """

    def __init__(self, f, dialect=csv.excel, encoding="utf-8", **kwds):
        # Redirect output to a queue
        self.queue = cStringIO.StringIO()
        self.writer = csv.writer(self.queue, dialect=dialect, **kwds)
        self.stream = f
        self.encoder = codecs.getincrementalencoder(encoding)()

    def writerow(self, row):
        self.writer.writerow([s.encode("utf-8") for s in row])
        # Fetch UTF-8 output from the queue ...
        data = self.queue.getvalue()
        data = data.decode("utf-8")
        # ... and reencode it into the target encoding
        data = self.encoder.encode(data)
        # write to the target stream
        self.stream.write(data)
        # empty queue
        self.queue.truncate(0)

    def writerows(self, rows):
        for row in rows:
            self.writerow(row)

Upvotes: 1

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