title: How to read excel Unicode characters using Python
body: <p>I am receiving an Excel file whose content I cannot influence. It contains some Unicode characters like "á" or "é". </p>
  
  <p>My code has been unchanged, but I migrated from Eclipse Juno to LiClipse together to a migration to a different python package (2.6 from 2.5). In principle the specific package I am using has a working version on win32com package.</p>
  
  <p>When I read the Excel file my code is crashing when extracting and converting to to strings using str(). The console output is the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in position 89: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Being more concrete I perform the following:</p>
  
  <p>Read the Excel:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  xlApp = Dispatch("Excel.Application")
  
    excel = xlApp.Workbooks.Open(excel_location)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in an internal loop I extract the value of the cell:</p>
  
  <pre><code>cell_value = self.excel.ActiveSheet.Cells(excel_line + 1, excel_column + 1)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and finally, if I try to convert cell_value to str, crashes:</p>
  
  <pre><code>print str(cell_value)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If I go to the Excel and remove the non-ASCII characters everything is working smoothly. I have tried this <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9942594/unicodeencodeerror-ascii-codec-cant-encode-character-u-xa0-in-position-20">encode proposal</a>. Any other solution I have googled proposes saving the file in a specific format, that I can't do.</p>
  
  <p>What puzzles me is that the code was working before with the same input Excel  but this change to LiClipse and 2.6 Python killed everything.</p>
  
  <p>Any idea how can I progress?</p>