UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters

I was getting the same UnicodeEncodeError when saving scraped web content to a file. To fix it I replaced this code:

with open(fname, "w") as f:
    f.write(html)

with this:

import io
with io.open(fname, "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    f.write(html)

Using io gives you backward compatibility with Python 2.

If you only need to support Python 3 you can use the builtin open function instead:

with open(fname, "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    f.write(html)

I fixed it by adding .encode("utf-8") to soup.

That means that print(soup) becomes print(soup.encode("utf-8")).


In Python 3.7, and running Windows 10 this worked (I am not sure whether it will work on other platforms and/or other versions of Python)

Replacing this line:

with open('filename', 'w') as f:

With this:

with open('filename', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:

The reason why it is working is because the encoding is changed to UTF-8 when using the file, so characters in UTF-8 are able to be converted to text, instead of returning an error when it encounters a UTF-8 character that is not suppord by the current encoding.