Python Error: UnicodeEncodeError: ‘charmap’ codec can’t encode character

Question:

I’ve discovered an error on your example ( https://www.example-code.com/chilkat2-python/xml_i.asp ) as follows…

    AccountID: f1f489fb-9267-429e-a1dc-bc63a7c3f71e
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "M:\EXPORTIT\PY\CK_xero_accounts.py", line 50, in 
        print("Name: " + xml.GetChildContent("Accounts|Account[i]|Name"))
      File "m:\Python\Python35-32\lib\encodings\cp437.py", line 19, in encode
        return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_map)[0]
    UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2013' in position 20: character maps to 

It’s failing on the this line from the “https://www.chilkatsoft.com/exampleData/xero_accounts.xml”,

          Wages Payable – Payroll

Answer:

The problem is that your Python code is expecting the returned string to be in the cp437 byte representation. “cp437” is code page 437, which is:

Code page 437 is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). 
It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or DOS Latin US. The set includes all 
printable ASCII characters, extended codes for accented letters (diacritics), some Greek letters, 
icons, and line-drawing symbols.

The problematic char is the funky dash char. Chilkat is returning strings using the utf-8 byte representation. The fix in Python is to tell Python that you’re expecting utf-8. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2276200/changing-default-encoding-of-python or Google “python use utf-8 by default” to see what other possible solutions exist.

Also see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56995919/change-python-3-7-default-encoding-from-cp1252-to-cp65001-aka-utf-8

Specifically, add the following to the top of your Python script:

import sys
import io
sys.stdout = io.TextIOWrapper(sys.stdout.detach(), encoding = 'utf-8')
sys.stderr = io.TextIOWrapper(sys.stderr.detach(), encoding = 'utf-8')