Q:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters

I'm trying to scrape a website, but it gives me an error.
I'm using the following code:
import urllib.request
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

get = urllib.request.urlopen("https://www.website.com/")
html = get.read()

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

print(soup)

And I'm getting the following error:
File "C:\Python34\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 19, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_table)[0]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters in position 70924-70950: character maps to <undefined>

What can I do to fix this?

A:

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)

A:

I fixed it by adding .encode("utf-8") to soup.
That means that print(soup) becomes print(soup.encode("utf-8")).

A:

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.

