How can I encode/decode \xbe in python?

Question

I have an excel file I am reading in python using the xlrd module. I am extracting the values from each row, adding some additional data and writing it all out to a new text file. However I am running into an issue with cells that contain text with the fraction 3/4. Python reads the value as \\xbe, and each time I encounter it, I get this error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xbe' in position 317: ordinal not in range(128)

I am converting my list of values from each row into a string, have tried the following without success:

row_vals_str = [unicode(str(val), 'utf-8') for val in row_vals]
row_vals_str = [str(val).encode('utf-8') for val in row_vals]
row_vals_str = [str(val).decode() for val in row_vals]

Each time I hit the first occurrence of the 3/4 fraction I get the same error.

How can I convert this to something that can be written to text?

I came across this thread but didn't find an answer: How to convert \\xXY encoded characters to UTF-8 in Python?

Answer 1

It is latin-1 group. you can use latin1 to decode the char or replace to different one if you do not need it.

http://www.codetable.net/hex/be

>>> '\xbe'.decode('latin1')
u'\xbe'
>>> '\xbe'.decode('cp1252')
u'\xbe'


>>> '\xbe this is a test'.replace('\xbe','3/4')
'3/4 this is a test'

Answer 2

实际工作的最终结果是解码字符串，然后对其进行编码，然后替换：

row_vals_str = [str(val).decode('latin1').encode('utf8').replace(r'\xbe', '3/4') for val in row_vals]