How to fix unicode error while generating xml file using python xml.etree.ElementTree without misssing any data?

Question

I am generating xml file using xml.etree.ElementTree in python and then writting the generated xml file into a file. One of the tag of the xml is regarding system installed software which will have all the details of the system installed software. The xml output on console which i get on execution of the script is perfect but when i try to place output into a file i encounter following error as:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\xmltry.py", line 65, in <module>
f.write(prettify(top))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf1' in position 4305: ordinal not in range(128)

Following is the script:

def prettify(elem):
"""Return a pretty-printed XML string for the Element.
"""
rough_string = ElementTree.tostring(elem, 'utf-8')
reparsed = minidom.parseString(rough_string)
return reparsed.toprettyxml(indent="  ")

##Here starts populating elements inside xml file
top = Element('my_practice_document')
comment = Comment('details')
top.append(comment)
child = SubElement(top, 'my_information')
childs = SubElement(child,'my_name')
childs.text = str(options.my_name)

#Following section is for retrieving list of software installed on the system
import wmi
w = wmi.WMI()
for p in w.Win32_Product():
if (p.Version is not None) and (p.Caption is not None):
    child = SubElement(top, 'sys_info') 
    child.text =  p.Caption + " version "+ p.Version 

## Following portion places the xml output into test.xml file
with open("test.xml", 'w') as f:
    f.write(prettify(top))

When the script is executed i get the unicode error . I searched on internet and tried out following also:

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

But this also did not resolved my issue. I want to have all the data which i am getting on console into the file without missing anything. So, how can i achieve that. Thanx in advance for your assistance.

Answer 1

You need to specify an encoding for your output file; sys.setdefaultencoding doesn't do that for you.

Try

import codecs
with codecs.open("test.xml", 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    f.write(prettify(top))