[Python-Dev] sys.setdefaultencoding() vs. csv module + unicode (original) (raw)

Kumar McMillan kumar.mcmillan at gmail.com
Wed Jun 13 22:30:57 CEST 2007

I'm seeing conflicting opinions on whether to put sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8') in sitecustomize.py or not ([1] vs. [2]) and frankly I'm confused.

The csv module says it's not unicode safe but the 2.5 docs [3] have a workaround for this. While the workaround says nothing about sys.setdefaultencoding() it simply does not work with the default encoding, "ascii." Is this the problem with the csv module? Should I give up and use XML? Below is code that works vs. code that doesn't. Am I interpretting the workaround from the docs wrong? If so, can someone please give me a hint ;) I should also point out that I've tried this with the StringIO queued approach (from the workaround) but that doesn't solve anything.

  1. with the default encoding :

kumar$ python2.5 Python 2.5 (r25:51918, Sep 19 2006, 08:49:13) [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5341)] on darwin

import sys, csv, codecs f = codecs.open('unicsv.csv','wb','utf-8') w = csv.writer(f) w.writerow([u'lang', u'espa\xa4ol']) Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa4' in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)

  1. with custom encoding :

kumar$ python2.5 -S Python 2.5 (r25:51918, Sep 19 2006, 08:49:13) [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5341)] on darwin

import sys, csv, codecs sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8') f = codecs.open('unicsv.csv','wb','utf-8') w = csv.writer(f) w.writerow([u'lang', u'espa\xa4ol']) f.close()

thanks, Kumar

[1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2007-June/073593.html [2] http://diveintopython.org/xml_processing/unicode.html [3] http://docs.python.org/lib/csv-examples.html#csv-examples

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