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From: Peter Otten <__peter__@web.de>
Subject: Re: Problem writing some strings (UnicodeEncodeError)
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2014 17:23:02 +0100
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:63781

Paulo da Silva wrote:

> I am using a python3 script to produce a bash script from lots of
> filenames got using os.walk.
> 
> I have a template string for each bash command in which I replace a
> special string with the filename and then write the command to the bash
> script file.
> 
> Something like this:
> 
> shf=open(bashfilename,'w')
> filenames=getfilenames() # uses os.walk
> for fn in filenames:
> ...
> cmd=templ.replace("<fn>",fn)
> shf.write(cmd)
> 
> For certain filenames I got a UnicodeEncodeError exception at
> shf.write(cmd)!
> I use utf-8 and have # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- in the source .py.
> 
> How can I fix this?
> 
> Thanks for any help/comments.

You make it harder to debug your problem by not giving the complete 
traceback. If the error message contains 'surrogates not allowed' like in 
the demo below

>>> with open("tmp.txt", "w") as f:
...     f.write("\udcef")
... 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't encode character '\udcef' in 
position 0: surrogates not allowed

you have filenames that are not valid UTF-8 on your harddisk. 

A possible fix would be to use bytes instead of str. For that you need to 
open `bashfilename` in binary mode ("wb") and pass bytes to the os.walk() 
call. 

Or you just go and fix the offending names.