Write xml utf-8 file with utf-8 data with ElementTree

elementtree, python

Solution

`codecs.open` expects Unicode strings to be written to the file object and it will handle encoding to UTF-8. ElementTree's `write` encodes the Unicode strings to UTF-8 byte strings before sending them to the file object. Since the file object wants Unicode strings, it is coercing the byte string back to Unicode using the default `ascii` codec and causing the `UnicodeDecodeError`.

Just do this:

#expfile = codecs.open('testunicode.xml',"w","utf-8-sig")
ET.ElementTree(testtag).write('testunicode.xml',encoding="UTF-8",xml_declaration=True)
#expfile.close()

Problem

I'm trying to write an xml file with utf-8 encoded data using ElementTree like this: ``` #!/usr/bin/python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET import codecs testtag = ET.Element('unicodetag') testtag.text = u'Töreboda' #The o is really &#246; (o with two dots over). No idea why SO dont display this expfile = codecs.open('testunicode.xml',"w","utf-8-sig") ET.ElementTree(testtag).write(expfile,encoding="UTF-8",xml_declaration=True) expfile.close() ``` This blows up with the error ``` Traceback (most recent call last): File "unicodetest.py", line 10, in <module> ET.ElementTree(testtag).write(expfile,encoding="UTF-8",xml_declaration=True) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 815, in write serialize(write, self._root, encoding, qnames, namespaces) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 932, in _serialize_xml write(_escape_cdata(text, encoding)) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 691, in write return self.writer.write(data) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 351, in write data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors) UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128) ``` Using the "us-ascii" encoding instead works fine, but don't preserve the unicode characters in the data. What is happening?

Original source