CSV, DictWriter, unicode and utf-8

Question

I am having problems with the DictWriter and non-ascii characters. A short version of my problem:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import codecs
import csv

f = codecs.open("test.csv", 'w', 'utf-8')
writer = csv.DictWriter(f, ['field1'], delimiter='\t')
writer.writerow({'field1':u'å'.encode('utf-8')})
f.close()

Gives this Traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "test.py", line 10, in <module>writer.writerow({'field1':u'å'.encode('utf-8')})
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/csv.py", line 124, in writerow
return self.writer.writerow(self._dict_to_list(rowdict))
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/codecs.py", line 638, in write
return self.writer.write(data)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/codecs.py", line 303, in write data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

I am bit lost as the DictWriter ought to be able to work with UTF-8 from what I have read in the documentation.

Answer 1

The object you obtain with codecs.open wants a unicode string in its write method -- that's the whole point. csv.DictWriter of course is calling that method with a utf8-encoded byte string instead, whence the exception.

Change f's creation to f = open("test.csv", 'wb') (taking codecs out of the picture) and things should work just fine.