I'm really new at python coding so please answer in detail and not too harsh.. I'm trying to replace the German umlaut 'ß' in an attribute table of a shapefile by 'ss' and am doing this by using the field calculator where you can add a python code block.

This is what I've tried so far:

def ecode(file, name, test):
    test.decode("utf-8")
    test.replace("\xe1", "ss")
    test.encode("utf-8")
    return test

Instead of "\xe1" I've also used "U+00DF" and "\xdf".

This error message occurs:

ERROR: ascii codec can't encode character u'\xdf' in position 11: ordinal not in range(128)

The streetname in this field of the attribute table is 'Zuccalistraße 21a', so obviously ß is the problem which is out of the ASCII range (there it >number 200). What can I do to replace it? I've searched the internet for 5 hours now....

Would love to get some answers! Kind regards, Ayla

So obviously, it's a problem with the decoding. When I try

def ecode(file, name, test):
    test=test.decode("utf-8")
    test=test.replace(u"\xdf", "ss")
    test=test.encode("utf-8")
    return test

I get the Error message:

File "C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.2\Lib\encodings\utf_8.py", line16, in decode return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xdf' in position 11: ordinal not in range(128)

Now I got an answer to the problem: I found that when you enter

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf8")

to the function, it works fine!! So thanks for trying to help me, have a nice day :)

Cheers, Ayla