selection by location with search cursor

Question

import arcpy

arcpy.env.overwriteOutput = True

points = r'C:\Users\Temitope\PycharmProjects\Scripts\DATA\ne_10m_populated_places_simple.shp'
countries = r'C:\Users\Temitope\PycharmProjects\Scripts\DATA\ne_50m_admin_0_countries.shp'
outpath = r'C:\Users\Temitope\PycharmProjects\Scripts\Output'

arcpy.MakeFeatureLayer_management(points, 'points_layer')

with arcpy.da.SearchCursor(countries, ['FID', 'SOVEREIGNT']) as country_cursor:
    for x in country_cursor:
        print x[1]
        arcpy.MakeFeatureLayer_management(countries, 'countries_layer', """ "FID" = {} """.format(x[0]))
        arcpy.SelectLayerByLocation_management('points_layer', 'WITHIN', 'countries_layer')
        formatted_output_name = x[1].replace('(', '_').replace(')', '_')
        arcpy.FeatureClassToFeatureClass_conversion('points_layer', outpath, 'cities_in_{}'.format(formatted_output_name))
        print 'Successfully converted {}'.format(formatted_output_name)

print 'Finished'

THIS IS MY OUTPUT:

Senegal
Successfully converted Senegal
Saudi Arabia
Successfully converted Saudi Arabia
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "C:/Users/Temitope/PycharmProjects/Scripts/gis_scripts/gis_script.py", line 17, in <module>
        arcpy.FeatureClassToFeatureClass_conversion('points_layer', outpath, 'cities_in_{}'.format(formatted_output_name))
    UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe3' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

    Process finished with exit code 1

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The reason this is failing is that you are using .format() with both regular str and a unicode str (the one returned by arcpy.da.searchcursor).

for example this fails in python 2:

myustring = unicode('ã', 'utf8')
print 'regular old string plus {}'.format(myustring)

but this would work:

myustring = unicode('ã', 'utf8')
print u'no longer a regular old string plus {}'.format(myustring)

so in your example, this line should fix your problem (changing the first str to unicode):

arcpy.FeatureClassToFeatureClass_conversion('points_layer', outpath, u'cities_in_{}'.format(formatted_output_name))

Switching to python 3 (with arcgisPro) would fix these headaches but of course that's not an option for everyone!