>>> string = unicode(raw_input(), 'utf8')
café
>>> log = open('/var/tmp/debug.log', 'w')
>>> log.write(string)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)
Okay, this is simple enough to solve: Just convert to a byte str and we’re all set:
>>> string = unicode(raw_input(), 'utf8')
café
>>> string_for_output = string.encode('utf8', 'replace')
>>> log = open('/var/tmp/debug.log', 'w')
>>> log.write(string_for_output)
>>>
Deal exclusively with unicode objects as much as possible by decoding things to unicode objects when you first get them and encoding them as necessary on the way out.
If your string is actually a unicode object, you’ll need to convert it to a unicode-encoded string object before writing it to a file:
(if you are not sure what is the type of your string. use type(your string) to check it, if it is something looks like u ‘….’, it is a unicode string.)
foo = u'Δ, Й, ק, م, ๗, あ, 叶, 葉, and 말.'
f = open('test', 'w')
f.write(foo.encode('utf8'))
f.close()
When you read that file again, you’ll get a unicode-encoded string that you can decode to a unicode object:
f = file('test', 'r')
print f.read().decode('utf8')

- https://pythonhosted.org/kitchen/unicode-frustrations.html (see here if it is irretrievalbe)