Writing To File - UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters

17 Jul 2013

I was getting a lot of errors when I was trying to download a file with the python requests library. The errors looked like the following:

UnicodeEncodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t encode characters in position 2-6: ordinal not in range(128)

This code ended up fixing it:

import codecs import requests import time # this could be different, but it works for my application, but the content-type definitely matters fileHeaders = { 'Content-Type': 'application/octet-stream;charset=text/html;charset=UTF-8' } url = 'www.yourfile.com/your.zip' with codecs.open('your.zip', mode='wb', encoding='utf-8') as handle: zip_file = requests.get(url, headers=fileHeaders, prefetch=False) for block in zip_file.iter_content(1024): if block: handle.write(block)