Handling Unicode Encoding Errors in Python 2.7 When Generating Plotly Time‑Series Charts

The author used Groovy to scrape historical weather data for over 3,000 Chinese cities and then attempted to plot each city's temperature range as a time‑series chart using Plotly. Plotly automatically opens a system browser for each chart, which caused the computer to freeze when generating many charts.

When using Chinese characters as part of the output file name, Python 2.7 raised the following error:

'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 69-70: ordinal not in range(128)

The program stopped, but the file had already been created. By adding appropriate exception handling, the author was able to let the script continue and meet the requirements, despite limited knowledge of Python 2.7 encoding issues.

Below is the relevant Python code (kept intact):

#!/usr/bin/python
# coding=utf-8
from first.date import DatePlot
import os
from second.MysqlFission import MysqlFission
import shutil
import time

class Fission:
    x = []
    y = []
    z = []
    d = []
    def __init__(self):
        print "欢迎使用fission类!"
    def getData(self, name):
        size = 0;
        with open("/Users/Vicky/Documents/workspace/source_api/long/" + name + ".log") as apidata:
            for i in apidata:
                data = i.split("
")[0].split("|")[0]
                low = i.split("
")[0].split("|")[1]
                high = i.split("
")[0].split("|")[2]
                diff = int(high) - int(low)
                self.x.append(data)
                self.y.append(low)
                self.z.append(high)
                self.d.append(diff)
                size += 1;
    def getDataMarkLine(self, name):
        with open("/Users/Vicky/Documents/workspace/source_api/long/" + name + ".log") as apidata:
            for i in apidata:
                data = i.split("
")[0].split("|")
                day = data[0]
                time = float(data[1])
                self.x.append(day)
                self.y.append(time)
        return [self.x, self.y]

if __name__ == "__main__":
    names = []
    for name in names:
        name = u"三沙"
        sql = MysqlFission()
        sql.getWeather(name)
        fission = Fission()
        fission.x = []
        fission.y = []
        fission.z = []
        fission.d = []
        fission.getData(name)
        try:
            DatePlot.MakePlotTwo(fission.x, name, high=fission.y, low=fission.z, diff=fission.d)
        except BaseException:
            print 2
        shutil.copyfile(name + ".html", "/Users/Vicky/Desktop/w/" + name + ".html")
        os.remove(name + ".html")
        time.sleep(5)

After fixing the encoding issue, the script successfully generates the time‑series plots, as illustrated by the example chart for Beijing shown in the article.