Python decode and encode with utf-8

Question

I am trying to encode and decode with utf-8. What is wierd is that I get an error trackback saying that I am using gbk.

oneword.decode("utf-8")]

below is the error trackback.

UnicodeEncodeError: 'gbk' codec can't encode character '\u2769' in position 1: illegal multibyte sequence

Can anyone tell me what to do? I seems that the decode parameter does not have effect.

• senshin: What is oneword? Please update your post with the result of print(oneword).
• aquavitae: Actually repr(oneword) might be more useful. The UnidoceEncodeError makes it look like its trying to first encode oneword before decoding it, as if oneword is a bytes object. I haven't seen this behaviour before in Python 3 though.

Answer 1

I got it solved. Actually, I intended to output to a file instead of the console. In such situation, I have to explicitly indicate the decoding of the output target file. Instead of using open I used codecs.open.

import codecs
f = codecs.open(filename, mode='w', encoding='utf-8')

Thanks to @Bakuriu from the comments:

If you are using Python 3 you no longer need to import the codecs module. Just pass the encoding parameter to the built-in open function.

• Bakuriu: In python3 there is no need to import the codecs module. Just pass the encoding parameter to the built-in open function. You can achieve the same behaviour in python2 using io.open.
• ShadowRanger: Adding to @Bakuriu: The codecs module actually has several annoying bugs that will likely never be fixed, and performs worse than the io module components (open is io.open on Python 3); you basically never want to use codecs.open unless your code needs to run unmodified all the way back to Python 2.5 (as of 2.6, io.open exists).