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python - UnicodeEncodeError, need fix

I am trying to use a simple python print statement.
print('这是')
But I am getting these issues.
I am using windows. Atom IDE. python 3.6.5
Regards,
Bhanu.

Add # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- to the top of your python script
Also, add the letter u before your string's opening quote:
print(u'这是')
Should work now. Will update with some more background to this VERY common stumbling block of strings, raw strings, Unicode, bytes, ASCII, encoding, decoding, etc.

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character - Scrapy [duplicate]

Say I have a function:
def NewFunction():
return '£'
I want to print some stuff with a pound sign in front of it and it prints an error when I try to run this program, this error message is displayed:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xa3' in file 'blah' but no encoding declared;
see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
Can anyone inform me how I can include a pound sign in my return function? I'm basically using it in a class and it's within the '__str__' part that the pound sign is included.

I'd recommend reading that PEP the error gives you. The problem is that your code is trying to use the ASCII encoding, but the pound symbol is not an ASCII character. Try using UTF-8 encoding. You can start by putting # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- at the top of your .py file. To get more advanced, you can also define encodings on a string by string basis in your code. However, if you are trying to put the pound sign literal in to your code, you'll need an encoding that supports it for the entire file.

Adding the following two lines at the top of my .py script worked for me (first line was necessary):
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

First add the # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- line to the beginning of the file and then use u'foo' for all your non-ASCII unicode data:
def NewFunction():
return u'£'
or use the magic available since Python 2.6 to make it automatic:
from __future__ import unicode_literals

The error message tells you exactly what's wrong. The Python interpreter needs to know the encoding of the non-ASCII character.
If you want to return U+00A3 then you can say
return u'\u00a3'
which represents this character in pure ASCII by way of a Unicode escape sequence. If you want to return a byte string containing the literal byte 0xA3, that's
return b'\xa3'
(where in Python 2 the b is implicit; but explicit is better than implicit).
The linked PEP in the error message instructs you exactly how to tell Python "this file is not pure ASCII; here's the encoding I'm using". If the encoding is UTF-8, that would be
# coding=utf-8
or the Emacs-compatible
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
If you don't know which encoding your editor uses to save this file, examine it with something like a hex editor and some googling. The Stack Overflow character-encoding tag has a tag info page with more information and some troubleshooting tips.
In so many words, outside of the 7-bit ASCII range (0x00-0x7F), Python can't and mustn't guess what string a sequence of bytes represents. https://tripleee.github.io/8bit#a3 shows 21 possible interpretations for the byte 0xA3 and that's only from the legacy 8-bit encodings; but it could also very well be the first byte of a multi-byte encoding. But in fact, I would guess you are actually using Latin-1, so you should have
# coding: latin-1
as the first or second line of your source file. Anyway, without knowledge of which character the byte is supposed to represent, a human would not be able to guess this, either.
A caveat: coding: latin-1 will definitely remove the error message (because there are no byte sequences which are not technically permitted in this encoding), but might produce completely the wrong result when the code is interpreted if the actual encoding is something else. You really have to know the encoding of the file with complete certainty when you declare the encoding.

Adding the following two lines in the script solved the issue for me.
# !/usr/bin/python
# coding=utf-8
Hope it helps !

You're probably trying to run Python 3 file with Python 2 interpreter. Currently (as of 2019), python command defaults to Python 2 when both versions are installed, on Windows and most Linux distributions.
But in case you're indeed working on a Python 2 script, a not yet mentioned on this page solution is to resave the file in UTF-8+BOM encoding, that will add three special bytes to the start of the file, they will explicitly inform the Python interpreter (and your text editor) about the file encoding.

Inconsistent output of unicode box-drawing characters in python IDLE

I have the following code:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
print "╔╤╤╦╤╤╦╤╤╗"
print "╠╪╪╬╪╪╬╪╪╣"
print "╟┼┼╫┼┼╫┼┼╢"
print "╚╧╧╩╧╧╩╧╧╝"
print "║"
print "│"
and for some reason, only the third line (╚╧╧╩╧╧╩╧╧╝) actually outputs properly, the rest is an odd combination of symbols. I assume this is due to some encoding issues. The full output in IDLE is as follows:
╔╤╤╦╤╤╦╤╤╗
╠╪╪╬╪╪╬╪╪╣
╟┼┼╫┼┼╫┼┼╢
╚╧╧╩╧╧╩╧╧╝
â•‘
│
What is causing this and how can I fix this? I'm using a tablet (Surface Pro 3 with Win10) with only a touch keyboard, so any solution with the least amount of typing (especially typing out weird characters) would be ideal, but obviously all help is appreciated.

Mojibake indicates that the text encoded in one encoding is shown in another incompatible encoding:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
print(u"╔╤╤╦╤╤╦╤╤╗".encode('utf-8').decode('cp1252')) #XXX: DON'T DO IT
# -> ╔╤╤╦╤╤╦╤╤╗
There are several places where the wrong encoding could be used.
# coding: utf-8 encoding declaration says how non-ascii characters in your source code (e.g., inside string literals) should be interpreted. If print u"╔╤╤╦╤╤╦╤╤╗" works in your case then it means that the source code itself is decoded to Unicode correctly. For debugging, you could write the string using only ascii characters: u'\u2554\u2557' == u'╔╗'.
print "╔╤╤╦╤╤╦╤╤╗" (DON'T DO IT) prints bytes (text encoded using utf-8 in this case) as is. IDLE itself works with Unicode (BMP). The bytes must be decoded into Unicode text before they can be shown in IDLE. It seems IDLE uses ANSI code page such as cp1252 (locale.getpreferredencoding(False)) to decode the output bytes on Windows. Don't print text as bytes. It will fail in any environment that uses a character encoding different from your source code e.g., you would get ΓòöΓòù... mojibake if you run the code from the question in Windows console that uses cp437 OEM code page.
You should use Unicode for all text in your program. Python 3 even forbids non-ascii characters inside a bytes literal. You would get SyntaxError there.
print(u'\u2554\u2557') might fail with UnicodeEncodeError if you would run the code in Windows console and OEM code page such as cp437 weren't be able to represent the characters. To print arbitrary Unicode characters in Windows console, use win-unicode-console package. You don't need it if you use IDLE.

Putting a u before the strings fixed the issue, as per #FredLarson's suggestion:
print u"╔╤╤╦╤╤╦╤╤╗"
print u"╠╪╪╬╪╪╬╪╪╣"
print u"╟┼┼╫┼┼╫┼┼╢"
print u"╚╧╧╩╧╧╩╧╧╝"
print u"║"
print u"│"
The exact cause still isn't known, since it seemed to work on other systems and it's odd that the third line worked fine.

How to encode 'Importação de petróleo' string in python?

I want to use "Importação de petróleo" in my program.
How can I do that because all encodings give me errors as cannot encode.

I think you're confusing the string __repr__ with its __str__:
>>> s = u"Importação de petróleo"
>>> s
u'Importa\xe7\xe3o de petr\xf3leo'
>>> print s
Importação de petróleo
There's no problem with \xe7 and friends; they are just the encoding representation for those special characters. You can't avoid them and you shouldn't need to :)
A must-to-read link about unicode: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Do this
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
print 'Importação de petróleo'
place
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
on very top of the program (first line).
Also save your code as utf-8 (default if you are using linux)

If you are using characters in a source (.py) file which are outside of the ASCII range, then you will need to specify the encoding at the top of the file, so that the Python lexer knows how to read and interpret the characters in the file.
If this is the case, then, as the very first line of your file, use this:
# coding: utf-8
(If your file is actually in a different encoding, such as ISO-8859-1, then you will need to use that instead. Python can handle several different character encodings; you just have to tell it what to expect)

Adding a 'u' in front of the string makes it unicode. The documentation here gives details regarding Unicode handling in Python 2.x:-
Python 2.x Unicode support

As specialscope mentioned, first thing, you have add this as the first line of your program:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
If you don’t, you’ll get an error which looks something like this:
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc3' in file /tmp/blah.py on line 10,
but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html
for details
So far, so good. Now, you have to make sure that every string that contains anything besides plain ASCII is prefixed with u:
print u'Importação de petróleo'
But there’s one more step. This is a separate topic, but chances are that you’re going to have to end up re-encoding that string before you send it to stdout or a file.
Here are the rules of thumb for Unicode in Python:
If at all possible make sure that any data you’re working with is in UTF-8.
When you read external UTF-8 encoded data into your program, immediately decode it into Unicode.
When you send data out of your program (to a file or stdout), make sure that you re-encode it as UTF-8.
This all changes in Python 3, by the way.

Help on class unicode in module builtin:
class unicode(basestring)
| unicode(string [, encoding[, errors]]) -> object
|
| Create a new Unicode object from the given encoded string.
| encoding defaults to the current default string encoding.
| errors can be 'strict', 'replace' or 'ignore' and defaults to 'strict'.
|
try using "utf8" as the encoding for unicode()

Unicode problems in PyObjC

I am trying to figure out PyObjC on Mac OS X, and I have written a simple program to print out the names in my Address Book. However, I am having some trouble with the encoding of the output.
#! /usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
from AddressBook import *
ab = ABAddressBook.sharedAddressBook()
people = ab.people()
for person in people:
name = person.valueForProperty_("First") + ' ' + person.valueForProperty_("Last")
name
when I run this program, the output looks something like this:
...snip...
u'Jacob \xc5berg'
u'Fernando Gonzales'
...snip...
Could someone please explain why the strings are in unicode, but the content looks like that?
I have also noticed that when I try to print the name I get the error
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xc5' in position 6: ordinal not in range(128)

# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
only affects the way Python decodes comments and string literals in your source, not the way standard output is configured, etc, etc. If you set your Mac's Terminal to UTF-8 (Terminal, Preferences, Settings, Advanced, International dropdown) and emit Unicode text to it after encoding it in UTF-8 (print name.encode("utf-8")), you should be fine.

If you run the code in your question in the interactive console the interpreter will print the repr of "name" because of the last statement of the loop.
If you change the last line of the loop from just "name" to "print name" the output should be fine. I've tested this with Terminal.app on a 10.5.7 system.

Just writing the variable name sends repr(name) to the standard output and repr() encodes all unicode values.
print tries to convert u'Jacob \xc5berg' to ASCII, which doesn't work. Try writing it to a file.
See Print Fails on the python wiki.
That means you're using legacy,
limited or misconfigured console. If
you're just trying to play with
unicode at interactive prompt move to
a modern unicode-aware console. Most
modern Python distributions come with
IDLE where you'll be able to print all
unicode characters.

Convert it to a unicode string through:
print unicode(name)