Unicodeencodeerror: 'ascii' Codec Can't Encode Character U'\u03c0'

I am trying to extract the attribute value Body from row element in pi.xml. cat pi.xml Copy

But if your script explicitly encodes its output, such as:

printu'somestring'.encode('utf8')

this method won't work. However, scripts should just print Unicode and let the terminal decide the encoding, as in:

printu'somestring'

Python will automatically encode for UTF-8 if the console is configured for UTF-8.

For your redirection case, Python doesn't know what encoding to use when printing Unicode, so defaults to ascii. Since redirection is a shell function, leave specifying the encoding to the shell using:

PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8 python pi.py >> py.txt.

This leaves the option open to use other encodings without modifying the script.