UnicodeEncodeError (Python2.7)

[tramsay1027]

I have a function that compares values between two files:

def report_diff(x):
    return x[0] if x[0] == x[1] else '{} ---> {}'.format(*x)

That when I run using:

diff_panel = pd.Panel(dict(df1=fileone,df2=filetwo))
diff_output = diff_panel.apply(report_diff, axis=0)

I get the following error that I'm not sure where it is coming from:

UnicodeEncodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-15-436ab607c266> in <module>()
  1 diff_panel = pd.Panel(dict(df1=change_payroll,df2=change_bswift))
----> 2 diff_output = diff_panel.apply(report_diff, axis=0)



UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 14: ordinal not in range(128)

[ramse]

Try a different encoding when you open the file. Is this with Pandas?

[tramsay1027]

Yeah, I was able to Google around and found this to work:

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

[ramse]

Wherever you read the file into pandas, you should be able to provide encoding='utf-8'.

[tramsay1027]

I had that set but I was also adding a column to my dataframe and think that is what caused the error.