'ascii' codec can't encode character : ordinal not in range (128)

Question

I'm scraping some webpages using selenium and beautifulsoup. I'm iterating through a bunch of links, grabbing info, and then dumping it into a JSON:

for event in events:

    case = {'Artist': item['Artist'], 'Date': item['Date'], 'Time': item['Time'], 'Venue': item['Venue'],
        'Address': item['Address'], 'Coordinates': item['Coordinates']}
    item[event] = case

with open("testScrape.json", "w") as writeJSON:
json.dump(item, writeJSON, ensure_ascii=False)

When I get to this link: https://www.bandsintown.com/e/100778334-jean-deaux-music-at-rickshaw-stop?came_from=257&utm_medium=web&utm_source=home&utm_campaign=event

The code breaks and I get the following error:

 Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/s/PycharmProjects/hi/BandsintownWebScraper.py", line 126, in <module>
    json.dump(item, writeJSON, ensure_ascii=False)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 190, in dump
    fp.write(chunk)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe6' in position 7: ordinal not in range(128)

I've tried to use:

json.dump(item, writeJSON, ensure_ascii=False).decode('utf-8')

And:

json.dump(item, writeJSON, ensure_ascii=False).encode('utf-8')

With no success. I believe it is the ï character on the link that is causing this to fail. Can anyone give a brief run-down of what's happening, what encode/decode means, and how to fix this issue? Thanks in advance.

Solution

You might need to set PYTHONIOENCODING before running your python script in the shell. For example, I got the same error while redirecting the python script output into a log file:

$ your_python_script > output.log
'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position xxxxx-xxxxx: ordinal not in range(128)

After changing PYTHONIOENCODING to UTF8 in the shell, script executed with no ASCII codec error:

$ export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8

$ your_python_script > output.log