Unicode Encode Error: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019'

python, unicode

Solution

If your list MUST BE a string list, try to encode title var

>>> alist=['á'] #asci string
>>> title = u'á' #unicode string
>>> alist[0] in title
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> title and alist[0] in title.encode('utf-8')
True
>>>

Problem

I'm trying to read html file but when sourcing out for the titles and urls to compare with my keyword `'alist'` I get this error `Unicode Encode Error: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019'.` Error in link(http://tinypic.com/r/307w8bl/8) Code ``` for q in soup.find_all('a'): title = (q.get('title')) url = ((q.get('href'))) length = len(alist) i = 0 while length > 0: if alist[i] in str(title): #checks for keywords from html form from the titles and urls r.write(title) r.write("\n") r.write(url) r.write("\n") i = i + 1 length = length -1 doc.close() r.close() ``` A little background. alist contains a list of keywords which I would use to compare it with title so as to get what I want. The strange thing is if alist contains 2 or more words, it would run perfectly but if there was only one word, the error as seen above would appear. Thanks in advance.

Original source