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From: Terry Jan Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu>
Subject: Re: How do I encode and decode this data to write to a file?
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:02:08 -0400
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:44525

On 4/29/2013 5:47 AM, cl@isbd.net wrote:

> case).  Here's the traceback:-
>

>    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gallery/picture.py", line 361,
 > in createPictureHTML file.write("".join(html).encode('utf-8'))
 > UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 
783: ordinal not in range(128)

Generiric advice for anyone getting unicode errors:
unpack the composition producing the error
so that one can see which operation produced it.

In this case
s = "".join(html)\
s = s.encode('utf-8')
file.write(s)

This also makes it possible to print intermediate results.
   print(type(s), s)  # would have been useful
Doing so would have immediately shown that in this case the error was 
the encode operation, because s was already bytes.
For many other posts, the error with the same type of message has been 
the print or write operation, do to output encoding issues, but that was 
not the case here.