Unicode error won't go away even after adding encoding='utf-8' command

Question

I'm trying to scrape from this website. But I'm getting unicode error. I did some searching and it seems its a encoding issue? but after adding the encoding='utf-8'it doesn't go away. not sure what the issue is.

    import bs4 as bs
    import urllib.request
    import csv
    import numpy as np


    base_url = "https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,"
    url_list =[]

    with open('url.csv', 'r') as f:
        reader = csv.reader(f)
        for row in reader:
            url_list.append(row[0])

    def extract(gameurl):
        req = urllib.request.Request(gameurl,headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})
        sauce = urllib.request.urlopen(req).read()
        soup = bs.BeautifulSoup(sauce,'lxml')
        infopage = soup.find_all("div", {"class":"col-md-8 col-lg-8"})
        core_list =[]

        for credits in infopage:
            niceHeaderTitle = credits.find_all("h1", {"class":"niceHeaderTitle"})
            name = niceHeaderTitle[0].text

            Titles = credits.find_all("h3", {"class":"clean"})

            Titles = [title.get_text() for title in Titles]

            tr = credits.find_all("tr")

            for i in range(len(tr)):
                row = tr[i].get_text(strip=True)
                if row in Titles:
                    title = row
                elif len(row) > 1:
                    games=[name,title,row]
                    core_list.append(games)

            core_list = np.matrix(core_list)

            return core_list



    def csv_write(url_data):
        with open ('HRdata.csv','a',encoding='utf-8') as file:
            writer=csv.writer(file)
            for row in url_data:
                writer.writerow(row)

    for url in url_list:
        link = base_url + url            
        url_data = extract(link)
        csv_write(url_data)

I thought it was because when I'm trying to write it into csv file so I added encoding='utf-8' but it didn't work... not sure what I should do to resolve this.

This is the error message

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeEncodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-22-31928933be8c> in <module>()
     52 for url in url_list:
     53     link = base_url + url
---> 54     url_data = extract(link)
     55     csv_write(url_data)
     56 

<ipython-input-22-31928933be8c> in extract(gameurl)
     15 def extract(gameurl):
     16     req = urllib.request.Request(gameurl,headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})
---> 17     sauce = urllib.request.urlopen(req).read()
     18     soup = bs.BeautifulSoup(sauce,'lxml')
     19     infopage = soup.find_all("div", {"class":"col-md-8 col-lg-8"})

C:\Anaconda3\lib\urllib\request.py in urlopen(url, data, timeout, cafile, capath, cadefault, context)
    221     else:
    222         opener = _opener
--> 223     return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
    224 
    225 def install_opener(opener):

C:\Anaconda3\lib\urllib\request.py in open(self, fullurl, data, timeout)
    524             req = meth(req)
    525 
--> 526         response = self._open(req, data)
    527 
    528         # post-process response

C:\Anaconda3\lib\urllib\request.py in _open(self, req, data)
    542         protocol = req.type
    543         result = self._call_chain(self.handle_open, protocol, protocol +
--> 544                                   '_open', req)
    545         if result:
    546             return result

C:\Anaconda3\lib\urllib\request.py in _call_chain(self, chain, kind, meth_name, *args)
    502         for handler in handlers:
    503             func = getattr(handler, meth_name)
--> 504             result = func(*args)
    505             if result is not None:
    506                 return result

C:\Anaconda3\lib\urllib\request.py in https_open(self, req)
   1359         def https_open(self, req):
   1360             return self.do_open(http.client.HTTPSConnection, req,
-> 1361                 context=self._context, check_hostname=self._check_hostname)
   1362 
   1363         https_request = AbstractHTTPHandler.do_request_

C:\Anaconda3\lib\urllib\request.py in do_open(self, http_class, req, **http_conn_args)
   1316             try:
   1317                 h.request(req.get_method(), req.selector, req.data, headers,
-> 1318                           encode_chunked=req.has_header('Transfer-encoding'))
   1319             except OSError as err: # timeout error
   1320                 raise URLError(err)

C:\Anaconda3\lib\http\client.py in request(self, method, url, body, headers, encode_chunked)
   1237                 encode_chunked=False):
   1238         """Send a complete request to the server."""
-> 1239         self._send_request(method, url, body, headers, encode_chunked)
   1240 
   1241     def _send_request(self, method, url, body, headers, encode_chunked):

C:\Anaconda3\lib\http\client.py in _send_request(self, method, url, body, headers, encode_chunked)
   1248             skips['skip_accept_encoding'] = 1
   1249 
-> 1250         self.putrequest(method, url, **skips)
   1251 
   1252         # chunked encoding will happen if HTTP/1.1 is used and either

C:\Anaconda3\lib\http\client.py in putrequest(self, method, url, skip_host, skip_accept_encoding)
   1115 
   1116         # Non-ASCII characters should have been eliminated earlier
-> 1117         self._output(request.encode('ascii'))
   1118 
   1119         if self._http_vsn == 11:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 38-40: ordinal not in range(128) 

Answer 1

http\client.py is trying to ascii encode your gameurl string, which it can't do because it includes a character that isn't in the ascii character set.

You need to URL encode the url, excluding the scheme (https://), by using the urllib.parse.quote() function. You only need to change the first line in this for loop:

    for url in url_list:
        link = base_url + urllib.parse.quote(url) # just doing the end is fine in this case
        url_data = extract(link)
        csv_write(url_data)

Alternatively, you can use the popular Requests module, which seamlessly takes care of this for you (I highly recommend it!).