Fixing a Python Error: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters

Conclusion

Set Python’s character encoding to utf-8.

Overview

While implementing code in Python to download images from image URLs like the one below,
I ran into the error mentioned in the title.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import urllib
import urllib2
import os.path
import sys
from HTMLParser import HTMLParser

def download(url):
    img = urllib.urlopen(url)
    localfile = open(os.path.basename(url),'wb')
    localfile.write(img.read())
    img.close()
    localfile.close()

• Specifically, it was failing here.

localfile.write(img.read())

Environment

• CentOS Linux release 7.0.1406 (Core)
• Python 2.7.5

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Checking the character encoding

When I checked interactively as shown below, it displayed ascii.
Let’s change this to utf-8.

$ python
>>> import sys
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'

Checking the pip path

The path is printed when you check the version.

$ pip --version
pip 7.1.0 from /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (python 2.7)

Create sitecustomize.py under site-packages

vi /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/sitecustomize.py

import sys
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

Save with the contents above.

Check the character encoding again

It is now utf-8.

$ python
>>> import sys
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'utf-8'

This resolved the error mentioned in the title.