For more background, I found the text from this session at the most recent PyCon interesting. It's a nice overview of Unicode in Python. "Pragmatic Unicode or How Do I Stop the Pain?" -- Ned Batchelder http://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html > -----Original Message----- > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of > Brian Kennison > Sent: Friday, March 09, 2012 9:17 AM > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Q.: MARC8 vs. MARC/Unicode and pymarc and > misencoded III records > > On Mar 8, 2012, at 1:46 PM, Terray, James wrote: > > > UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe8 in position 9: > ordinal not in range(128) > > > Hello everyone, > > I just ran into this the other day when trying to write to a file. I searched the > documentation and found this: > > fp = codecs.open("dc.csv", mode="w", encoding="utf-8") > > This opens a file that is utf-8 aware and it let me write the file. Doesn't answer > your question about the encoding but it will let you save the record. > > -- > Brian Kennison > Western Connecticut State University