Probleme encoding characters with Python 2.7

Question

It works fine with regular characters but it doesn't work with accented characters like é,à etc... Here is the program:

def search():
    connection = sqlite3.connect('vocab.sqlite')
    cursor = connection.cursor()
    sql = "SELECT   French, English value FROM Ami "
    cursor.execute(sql)
    data = cursor.fetchall()
    data=sorted(data)
    file_open=open('vraiamis.html','w')
    for i in data:
       a='<a href="'+'http://www.google.fr/#hl=fr&gs_nf=1&cp=4&gs_id=o&xhr=t&q='
       a=a+str(i[0]).encode('latin-1')+'">'+str(i[0]).encode('latin-1')+'</a>'+'<br>'
       file_open.write(a)

 file_open.close()
 webbrowser.open('vraiamis.html')

when the value in the database contains special characters like é,à,ç ( it doesn't work I get the following error message: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

Thanks in advance for your help

Answer 1

Try

a=a+i[0].encode('latin-1')+'">' + i[0].encode('latin-1')+'</a>'+'<br>'

etc - your str() calls are trying to convert the unicode to a bytestring before you've decoded it.

Answer 2

You may write your vraiamis.html in utf-8 encoding, so that your special characters may be encoded.

def search():
    import codecs
    connection = sqlite3.connect('vocab.sqlite')
    cursor = connection.cursor()
    sql = "SELECT   French, English value FROM Ami "
    cursor.execute(sql)
    data = cursor.fetchall()
    data=sorted(data) 
    file_open= codecs.open('vraiamis.html', 'w', encoding='utf-8')
    for i in data:
       a=u'<a href="' + u'http://www.google.fr/#hl=fr&gs_nf=1&cp=4&gs_id=o&xhr=t&q='
       a=a + i[0] + u'">' + i[0] + u'</a>' + u'<br>'
       file_open.write(a)
    file_open.close()
    webbrowser.open('vraiamis.html')