在python中将字符串列表转换为unicode字符

Question

My python code using facebook API to request user's info. And the name can contain Unicode characters:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from facebook import Facebook

def desktop_app():
# Get api_key and secret_key from a file
    facebook = Facebook('x', 'xx')
    facebook.auth.createToken()
# Show login window
    facebook.login()
# Login to the window, then press enter
    print 'After logging in, press enter...'
    raw_input()
    facebook.auth.getSession()
    info = facebook.users.getInfo([facebook.uid], [u'name', 'birthday', 'affiliations', 'sex'])[0]
    for attr in info:
        print '%s: %s'.encode('ascii') % (attr, info[attr])
    friends = facebook.friends.get()
    friends = facebook.users.getInfo(friends[0:5], [u'name', 'birthday', 'relationship_status'])
    for friend in friends:
        if 'birthday' in friend:
            print friend['name'].encode('utf8'), 'has a birthday on', friend['birthday'], 'and is', friend['relationship_status']
        else:
            print friend['name'].encode('utf8'), 'has no birthday and is', friend['relationship_status']
    arefriends = facebook.friends.areFriends([friends[0]['uid']], [friends[1]['uid']])

if __name__ == "__main__":
    desktop_app()

I got this error when the Facebook name contain Unicode characters:

File "C:\\Python27\\lib\\encodings\\cp437.py", line 12, in encode return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_map) UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\ũ' in position 7: character maps to

Thanks in advance if u help me to fix that! :)

Answer 1

The quick and dirty answer is to use somestring.encode('ascii', 'ignore') to handle unexpected characters.

I suspect you code has deeper problems though. If you're printing real unicode strings, you don't have to encode them first (otherwise, their meaning will be lost before print gets to them):

>>> print u'ba\u0169er'     # no encode or decode is needed to print
baũer

Also, the line print '%s: %s'.encode('ascii') % (attr, info[attr]) is encoding the template before any string substitution has taken place. That likely isn't what you intended.

Answer 2

The problem is that your console doesn't support one or more of the characters you're receiving. You can execute chcp 65001 to make the console support UTF-8 (and as a side bonus, you don't have to encode manually), but this may have an adverse effect on other programs run from the same console.

Answer 3

The easiest solution is to use an IDE that supports UTF-8, such as Pythonwin that comes with the pywin32 extensions. Leave your strings in Unicode and just print them and they will display properly on a UTF-8 terminal (as long as the font supports the characters, of course).