python - UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters

Question

I'm trying to scrape a website, but it gives me an error.

I'm using the following code:

import urllib.request
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

get = urllib.request.urlopen("https://www.website.com/")
html = get.read()

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

print(soup)

And I'm getting the following error:

File "C:\Python34\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 19, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_table)[0]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters in position 70924-70950: character maps to <undefined>

What can I do to fix this?

Answer 1

I was getting the same UnicodeEncodeError when saving scraped web content to a file. To fix it I replaced this code:

with open(fname, "w") as f:
    f.write(html)

with this:

import io
with io.open(fname, "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    f.write(html)

Using io gives you backward compatibility with Python 2.

If you only need to support Python 3 you can use the builtin open function instead:

with open(fname, "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    f.write(html)

If your file is encoded in something other than UTF-8, specify whatever your actual encoding is for encoding.

Answer 2

I fixed it by adding .encode("utf-8") to soup.

That means that print(soup) becomes print(soup.encode("utf-8")).

Answer 3

In Python 3.7, and running Windows 10 this worked (I am not sure whether it will work on other platforms and/or other versions of Python)

Replacing this line:

with open('filename', 'w') as f:

With this:

with open('filename', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:

The reason why it is working is because the encoding is changed to UTF-8 when using the file, so characters in UTF-8 are able to be converted to text, instead of returning an error when it encounters a UTF-8 character that is not suppord by the current encoding.

Answer 4

set PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8
set PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSSTDIO=utf-8

You may or may not need to set that second environment variable PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSSTDIO.

Alternatively, this can be done in code (although it seems that doing it through env vars is recommended):

sys.stdin.reconfigure(encoding='utf-8')
sys.stdout.reconfigure(encoding='utf-8')

---

Additionally: Reproducing this error was a bit of a pain, so leaving this here too in case you need to reproduce it on your machine:

set PYTHONIOENCODING=windows-1252
set PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSSTDIO=windows-1252

Answer 5

While saving the response of get request, same error was thrown on Python 3.7 on window 10. The response received from the URL, encoding was UTF-8 so it is always recommended to check the encoding so same can be passed to avoid such trivial issue as it really kills lots of time in production

import requests
resp = requests.get('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIFTY_50')
print(resp.encoding)
with open ('NiftyList.txt', 'w') as f:
    f.write(resp.text)

When I added encoding="utf-8" with the open command it saved the file with the correct response

with open ('NiftyList.txt', 'w', encoding="utf-8") as f:
    f.write(resp.text)

Answer 6

Even I faced the same issue with the encoding that occurs when you try to print it, read/write it or open it. As others mentioned above adding .encoding="utf-8" will help if you are trying to print it.

soup.encode("utf-8")

If you are trying to open scraped data and maybe write it into a file, then open the file with (......,encoding="utf-8")

with open(filename_csv , 'w', newline='',encoding="utf-8") as csv_file:

Answer 7

For those still getting this error, adding encode("utf-8") to soup will also fix this.

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser').encode("utf-8")
print(soup)

Answer 8

if you are using windows try to pass encoding='latin1', encoding='iso-8859-1' or encoding='cp1252' example:

csv_data = pd.read_csv(csvpath,encoding='iso-8859-1')
print(print(soup.encode('iso-8859-1')))