Unable to use unicode strings with Python 2

[flothesof]

I'm trying to use French labels within a TextClip.
However, the rendering with ImageMagick fails:

UnicodeEncodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-5-9c706287e797> in <module>()
      5                          font=font,
      6                          fontsize=fontsize,
----> 7                          size=(W, H)).set_pos('center').set_duration(5))
      8     if vid != None:
      9         start, end = subsection

C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\moviepy\video\VideoClip.py in __init__(self, txt, size, color, bg_color, fontsize, font, stroke_color, stroke_width, method, kerning, align, interline, tempfilename, temptxt, transparent, remove_temp, print_cmd)
   1048                     os.write(temptxt_fd, bytes(txt,'UTF8'))
   1049                 except TypeError: # oops, fall back to Python2
-> 1050                     os.write(temptxt_fd, txt)
   1051                 os.close(temptxt_fd)
   1052             txt = '@'+temptxt

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 33: ordinal not in range(128)

There seems to be a possible workaround by doing the following:

#os.write(temptxt_fd, txt)
os.write(temptxt_fd, txt.encode('utf-8'))

But this won't get me any UTF-8 text on the picture. Instead, I get the classical encoding mismatched characters.

Any idea on how to fix this?

Thanks!

[Zulko]

When I use the IPython notebook, any text like "Être à côté" will work. When I use a .py file, I generally need to declare the encoding at the beginning of the file, like this:

# -*- coding: latin-1 -*-

Have you tried that ?

[flothesof]

I'm using the IPython notebook with Python 2 and I get the error I posted above. Are you using Python 3 with the IPython notebook?

[Zulko]

I use IPython 2.0.0 which runs with Python 2.7.3 on my computer. Strange.

[flothesof]

I don’t know :)

On 18 Nov 2014, at 19:06, oz26 notifications@github.com wrote:

well :)

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[Zulko]

I'm not sure I understand what's going on. @oz26 do you have the same bug ?

[adamserafini]

@flothesof The font matters: if the font doesn't support those characters you'll see question marks. See this thread and this one on the ImageMagick forum for more details.

[flothesof]

Hey thanks for writing this here. This might be it. I'm going to try this again and post the result here.

[keikoro]

@flothesof Did you ever get around to testing this with a different font? Was what @adamserafini suggested the solution to your problem?

If so, we could add a hint about that to the documentation.

[keikoro]

Ping @flothesof

[flothesof]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for helping me out on this.
I think I managed to get it working at the time.
I believe the issue can be closed, since the last time I tried this (which was with Python 3) it was working.

I'll close the issue now.

Best
Florian