python - Scrapy how to handle pound sign? -

i'm new python , scrapy , i'm trying test if string (extracted using xpath selector) contains pound symbol (british currency - £).

at top of source file have specified encoding:

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

and i'm performing test:

if '£' in price: ...

however i'm getting error exceptions.unicodedecodeerror: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2.

if alter test to

price = price.encode('utf-8') if '£' in price: ...

it works. can explain why price.encode() phone call necessary, understood scrapy returns unicode strings anyway. many thanks

# these have different types: if some_string in some_unicode_object

doing equivalent writing:

# convert first argument can `in` if some_string.decode('ascii') in some_unicode_object

so in example:

if '£' in price: # ^string ^unicode

you're calling '£'.encode('ascii'), fails because isn't ascii bytestring.

a improve way of writing be:

if u'£' in price:

alternatively, may want write from __future__ import unicode_literals.

python scrapy

Jaimee