title: "ascii" codec can't encode characters in position 0-2: ordinal not in range(128)
body: <p>I am using python 2.7 and used Chinese characters in my code, so...</p>
  
  <pre><code># coding = utf-8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and the problem is part of my code, as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>def fileoutput():
      global percent_shown
      date = str(datetime.datetime.now()).decode('utf-8')
      with open("result.txt","a") as datafile:
          datafile.write(date+"   "+str(percent_shown.get()))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>percent_shown is a string that includes Chinese characters</p>
  
  <p>When I run it, I get:</p>
  
  <p>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-2: ordinal not in range(128)</p>
  
  <p>How to fix it? Thanks</p>