UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2264'

Question

• I'm using python3.6 in windows7 and django 1.9
• I got this error when i run my code.
• In my code i'm parsing xml data to write a html page.
• I got that some character is unable to encode properly thats why its throwing an error.
• \u2264 this is the character(less than or equal) which is the root cause of the error.
• My question is how to encode this properly in python3

Detailed Error Log:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Dev\EXE\TEMP\cookie\crumbs\views.py", line 1520, in parser
    html_file.write(html_text)
  File "C:\Users\Cookie1\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 19, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_table)[0]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2264' in position 389078: character maps to <undefined>

Answer 1

The error message indicates that you're trying to encode to the Windows-1252 character encoding. That encoding doesn't have a representation of the less than or equal symbol.

>>> "\u2264".encode("cp1252")
>>> Traceback... [as above]

The answer is to use UTF-8, an unrestricted encoding, instead of Windows-1252, a very restricted encoding.

Your question doesn't include much context, but the line html_file.write(html_text) makes me think you're using Python's file protocol. The documentation for open() shows how to set the encoding, e.g.

html_file = open("file.html", mode="w", encoding="utf8")

Note that "the default encoding is platform dependent (whatever locale.getpreferredencoding() returns)", which is why you're getting Windows-1252 on Windows 7.