Python Error UnicodeEncodeError ascii codec can t encode character u u03b1 in position 20 ordinal not in range 128

Question

I'm trying to write a to a csv file, I get the following error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u03b1' in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)

Line causing error:

df.to_csv('out.csv')

Answer 1

use the sep argument of to_csv, to delimit by a tab:

df.to_csv(file_name, sep='\t')

To use a specific encoding (e.g. 'utf-8') use the encoding argument:

df.to_csv(file_name, sep='\t', encoding='utf-8')

Answer 2

import csv

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

data = [["a", "b", u'\xe9']]

with open("output.csv", "w") as csv_file:
    writer = csv.writer(csv_file, quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)
    writer.writerows(data)

Comments

Hi. I am getting the following error when I ran this script:

NameError: name 'reload' is not defined

---

Use the following line to import the module

from importlib import reload

In Python 2, this was in build but in python, you've to use importlib.