What are the differences between UTF-8 and ASCII encoding in Python?

What are the differences between UTF-8 and ASCII encoding in Python?

UTF-8 can represent a wider range of characters than ASCII. ASCII is limited to 128 characters, while UTF-8 can handle all Unicode characters.

Can you give me an example of how to encode a string in both formats?

Sure! In Python, you can encode a string in UTF-8 using string.encode('utf-8') and in ASCII using string.encode('ascii'). Just remember that ASCII will raise an error if the string contains non-ASCII characters.

What happens if I try to encode a non-ASCII character with ASCII?

If you try to encode a non-ASCII character with ASCII, Python will raise a UnicodeEncodeError, indicating that the character cannot be represented in ASCII.

How can I handle such errors when encoding?

You can handle encoding errors by using the errors parameter in the encode method, like this: string.encode('ascii', errors='ignore') to skip non-ASCII characters.