[Python] Character encoding error when writing url in FPDF2

I'm working in Python 3.7 and have the python port of FPDF 2.0.3 (https://pypi.org/project/fpdf2/) running. I'm working with a lot of unicode symbols, and some of them need to be a part of the URL. I can write them as text without problem, but I keep getting error messages when a unicode symbol becomes a part of my URL.

Tried to escape with html.escape(str), this didn't work Rewritten the code to use write_html(html_as_str), this didn't work either

this is working code:

add = "Chronique d‘Égypte (CdE)" ##this is actually pulled in from a MYSQL query using PYMYSQL
from fpdf import FPDF
pdf = FPDF('P', 'mm', 'A4')
pdf.add_page()
pdf.add_font('base', '', r'C:\Fonts\DejaVuSans.ttf', uni=True)
pdf.set_font('base', '',12)
pdf.write(5, add)
pdf.output("goodfile.pdf", "F")



With this script I get the string printed. However I want the string to be printed and be a part of a url like this:

add = "Chronique d‘Égypte (CdE)" ##this is actually pulled in from a MYSQL query using PYMYSQL
from fpdf import FPDF
pdf = FPDF('P', 'mm', 'A4')
pdf.add_page()
pdf.add_font('base', '', r'C:\Fonts\DejaVuSans.ttf', uni=True)
pdf.set_font('base', '',12)
pdf.write(5, add, 'https://www.example.org/index.php?searchterm='+add)
pdf.output("goodfile.pdf", "F")



This second script fails with the following error message in my console:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File ".\print.py", line 543, in <module>
pdf.output(Filename+'_CORPUS.pdf', 'F')
File "C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37\lib\site-packages\fpdf\fpdf.py", line 1239, in output
buffer = self.buffer.encode("latin1")
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u2018' in position 1587960: ordinal not in range(256)



The error message itself is very confusing as the part that adds the string that causes the error happens around line 470; whereas the traceback only mentions line 543.

I expect the output to be a clickable link in my pdf, opening the default browser and going to the specified URL with the characters as they are in the PDF. I can't replace this character by a normal quote, as it give me other (in this case none) results on that site.

Also, could someone add a tag FPDF2 to help categorize this correctly?

Continue reading...