What could be causing this error when I try to insert a foreign character into the database?
>>UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u201c' in position 0: ordinal not in range(256)
And how do I resolve it?
Thanks!
I ran into this same issue when using the Python MySQLdb module. Since MySQL will let you store just about any binary data you want in a text field regardless of character set, I found my solution here:
Using UTF8 with Python MySQLdb
Edit: Quote from the above URL to satisfy the request in the first comment...
"UnicodeEncodeError:'latin-1' codec can't encode character ..."
This is because MySQLdb normally tries to encode everythin to latin-1.
This can be fixed by executing the following commands right after
you've etablished the connection:
db.set_character_set('utf8')
dbc.execute('SET NAMES utf8;')
dbc.execute('SET CHARACTER SET utf8;')
dbc.execute('SET character_set_connection=utf8;')
"db" is the result of MySQLdb.connect(), and "dbc" is the result of
db.cursor().
Character U+201C Left Double Quotation Mark is not present in the Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) encoding.
It is present in code page 1252 (Western European). This is a Windows-specific encoding that is based on ISO-8859-1 but which puts extra characters into the range 0x80-0x9F. Code page 1252 is often confused with ISO-8859-1, and it's an annoying but now-standard web browser behaviour that if you serve your pages as ISO-8859-1, the browser will treat them as cp1252 instead. However, they really are two distinct encodings:
>>> u'He said \u201CHello\u201D'.encode('iso-8859-1')
UnicodeEncodeError
>>> u'He said \u201CHello\u201D'.encode('cp1252')
'He said \x93Hello\x94'
If you are using your database only as a byte store, you can use cp1252 to encode “ and other characters present in the Windows Western code page. But still other Unicode characters which are not present in cp1252 will cause errors.
You can use encode(..., 'ignore') to suppress the errors by getting rid of the characters, but really in this century you should be using UTF-8 in both your database and your pages. This encoding allows any character to be used. You should also ideally tell MySQL you are using UTF-8 strings (by setting the database connection and the collation on string columns), so it can get case-insensitive comparison and sorting right.
The best solution is
set mysql's charset to 'utf-8'
do like this comment(add use_unicode=True and charset="utf8")
db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost", user = "root", passwd = "", db = "testdb", use_unicode=True, charset="utf8") – KyungHoon Kim Mar
13 '14 at 17:04
detail see :
class Connection(_mysql.connection):
"""MySQL Database Connection Object"""
default_cursor = cursors.Cursor
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
"""
Create a connection to the database. It is strongly recommended
that you only use keyword parameters. Consult the MySQL C API
documentation for more information.
host
string, host to connect
user
string, user to connect as
passwd
string, password to use
db
string, database to use
port
integer, TCP/IP port to connect to
unix_socket
string, location of unix_socket to use
conv
conversion dictionary, see MySQLdb.converters
connect_timeout
number of seconds to wait before the connection attempt
fails.
compress
if set, compression is enabled
named_pipe
if set, a named pipe is used to connect (Windows only)
init_command
command which is run once the connection is created
read_default_file
file from which default client values are read
read_default_group
configuration group to use from the default file
cursorclass
class object, used to create cursors (keyword only)
use_unicode
If True, text-like columns are returned as unicode objects
using the connection's character set. Otherwise, text-like
columns are returned as strings. columns are returned as
normal strings. Unicode objects will always be encoded to
the connection's character set regardless of this setting.
charset
If supplied, the connection character set will be changed
to this character set (MySQL-4.1 and newer). This implies
use_unicode=True.
sql_mode
If supplied, the session SQL mode will be changed to this
setting (MySQL-4.1 and newer). For more details and legal
values, see the MySQL documentation.
client_flag
integer, flags to use or 0
(see MySQL docs or constants/CLIENTS.py)
ssl
dictionary or mapping, contains SSL connection parameters;
see the MySQL documentation for more details
(mysql_ssl_set()). If this is set, and the client does not
support SSL, NotSupportedError will be raised.
local_infile
integer, non-zero enables LOAD LOCAL INFILE; zero disables
autocommit
If False (default), autocommit is disabled.
If True, autocommit is enabled.
If None, autocommit isn't set and server default is used.
There are a number of undocumented, non-standard methods. See the
documentation for the MySQL C API for some hints on what they do.
"""
I hope your database is at least UTF-8. Then you will need to run yourstring.encode('utf-8') before you try putting it into the database.
Use the below snippet to convert the text from Latin to English
import unicodedata
def strip_accents(text):
return "".join(char for char in
unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', text)
if unicodedata.category(char) != 'Mn')
strip_accents('áéíñóúü')
output:
'aeinouu'
You are trying to store a Unicode codepoint \u201c using an encoding ISO-8859-1 / Latin-1 that can't describe that codepoint. Either you might need to alter the database to use utf-8, and store the string data using an appropriate encoding, or you might want to sanitise your inputs prior to storing the content; i.e. using something like Sam Ruby's excellent i18n guide. That talks about the issues that windows-1252 can cause, and suggests how to process it, plus links to sample code!
SQLAlchemy users can simply specify their field as convert_unicode=True.
Example:
sqlalchemy.String(1000, convert_unicode=True)
SQLAlchemy will simply accept unicode objects and return them back, handling the encoding itself.
Docs
Latin-1 (aka ISO 8859-1) is a single octet character encoding scheme, and you can't fit \u201c (“) into a byte.
Did you mean to use UTF-8 encoding?
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u2013' in position 106: ordinal not in range(256)
Solution 1:
\u2013 - google the character meaning to identify what character actually causing this error, Then you can replace that specific character, in the string with some other character, that's part of the encoding you are using.
Solution 2:
Change the string encoding to some encoding which includes all the character of your string. and then you can print that string, it will work just fine.
below code is used to change encoding of the string , borrowed from #bobince
u'He said \u201CHello\u201D'.encode('cp1252')
The latest version of mysql.connector has only
db.set_charset_collation('utf8', 'utf8_general_ci')
and NOT
db.set_character_set('utf8') //This feature is not available
I ran into the same problem when I was using PyMySQL. I checked this package version, it's 0.7.9.
Then I uninstall it and reinstall PyMySQL-1.0.2, the issue is solved.
pip uninstall PyMySQL
pip install PyMySQL
Python: You will need to add
# - * - coding: UTF-8 - * - (remove the spaces around * )
to the first line of the python file. and then add the following to the text to encode: .encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace'). This will replace all the unicode characters with it's ASCII equivalent.
Trying to save models and i get a:
java.sql.SQLException: Incorrect string value: ...
Saving a text like "jedna dva tři kachna dům a kachní maso"
I'm using default.url="jdbc:mysql://[url]/[database]?characterEncoding=UTF-8"
řů have no encoding in latin1; áõ do. That suggests that CHARACTER SET latin1 is involved somewhere. Let's see SHOW CREATE TABLE.
C599, etc, are valid utf8 encodings for the corresponding characters.
? occurs when the destination character set cannot represent the character. Again, this points to the column/table being latin1, when it should be utf8 (or utf8mb4).
More discussion, and for debugging similar situations: Trouble with utf8 characters; what I see is not what I stored
Probably has some special character, and the UTF-8 encode that you are forcing may cause some error.
This ASCII string has the following text:
String:
jedna dva tři kachna dům a kachní maso
ASCII:
'jedna dva t\xc5\x99i kachna d\xc5\xafm a kachn\xc3\xad maso'
Recently I've been working on implementation of Label generation for FedEx and UPS couriers using they external service. I have a problem with special characters printed on label. Within response I'm getting correct text but on Label all special chars are replaced by dummy signs. According UPS&FedEx docs they perfectly supports such characters on labels till they are passed as UTF-8 and encoding node in xml is present (pointing to UTF-8).
Did anyone faced similar problem? Maybe there is an official note from them that they'r not supporting such case that I'm not aware of.
UPS and FedEx APIs supports only Latin-1 chars. Dummy chars were assigned by auto utf-8 cast in one of internal methods (dicttoxml) that results in double UTF-8 encoding.
I'm using Ruby - Cucumber for automation.
I'm trying to send Japanese chars as a parameter to the user defined function to verify in db.
Below is the statement what I have used :
x=$objDB.run_select_query_verifyText('select name from xxxx where id=1','ごせり槎ゃぱ')
In the run_select_query_verifyText() function I have the code to connect db and get the records from db and it will verify the the text which is passed as a parameter(Japanese chars. )
This function returns true if the string is match with table data in DB else false.
But I'm getting always false and I found that the Japanese string is converting as "??????" while comparing the data.
Note: My program is working fine with English chars.
Your problem is most likely with character encodings. The database returns the content in a different encoding that the Ruby string you are working with. You need to figure out what the db encoding is and make sure both are the same.
If you are using ruby 1.9, you can check the encoding current encoding with yourstring.encoding and change it to e.g. UTF-8 with yourstring.encode("UTF-8").
If you are on ruby 1.8 things are bit more tricky as the String class doesn't natively support encodings. You can use e.g. the character-encodings gem to work around this.
I'm using simplexml_load_file method for parsing feed from external source.
My code like this
$rssFeed['DAILYSTAR'] = 'http://www.thedailystar.net/latest/rss/rss.xml';
$rssParser = simplexml_load_file($url);
The output is as follows :
Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: http://www.thedailystar.net/latest/rss/rss.xml:12: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0x92 0x73 0x20 0x48 in C:\xampp\htdocs\googlebd\index.php on line 39
Ultimately stop with a fatal error. Main problem is the site's character encoding is ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8.
Can i be able to read this using this method(SimpleXML API)?
If no then any other method is available?
I've searched through Google but no answer. Every method I applied returns with this error.
Thanks,
Rashed
Well, well, when I retrieve this content using Python, I get the following:
'\n<rss version="2.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1">\n [...]
<description>The results of this year\x92s Higher Secondary Certificate
Now it says it's ISO-8859-1, but \x92 is not in that character set, but instead is the closing curly single quote, used as an apostrophe, in Windows-1252. So the page throws an encoding error, and as per the XML spec, clients should be "strict" and not fix errors.
You can retrieve it, and filter out the non-ISO-8859-1 characters in some fashion, or better, convert the encoding using mb-convert-encoding() before passing the result to your RSS parser.
Oh, and if you want to incorporate the result into a UTF-8 page, you may have convert everything to UTF-8, though this is English, which might not even require any different character encodings, if all turns out to be ASCII after all.
We ran into the same issue and used utf8_encode to change the encoding from ISO-8859-1/latin-1 to UTF-8 and get past the error.
$contents = file_get_contents($url);
simplexml_load_string(utf8_encode($contents));