Python Astropy: encoding error while converting a .csv file to .fits-CodePudding

I have a .csv file (comma separated data) where one column contains special symbols like α (alpha), while other columns contains strings, int or floats.

I try to read this csv file and write it into a .fits file using this code:

fits.writeto(target_file.fits, np.array(Table.read(source_file.csv)))

But at the α (alpha) symbol position, the code throws me an error:

'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 2-3: ordinal not in range(128)

I suppose I have to encode something in utf-8, and I tried different solutions without success. May you please help me ?

CodePudding user response：

FITS only supports ASCII. You should be able to do something like below where you manually encode to bytes and then decode back to unicode:

>>> from astropy.table.table_helpers import simple_table
>>> from astropy.table import Table
>>> t = simple_table()
>>> t['c'] = "α"
>>> t
<Table length=3>
  a      b     c  
int64 float64 str1
----- ------- ----
    1     1.0    α
    2     2.0    α
    3     3.0    α
>>> t.convert_unicode_to_bytestring()
>>> t
<Table length=3>
  a      b      c   
int64 float64 bytes2
----- ------- ------
    1     1.0      α
    2     2.0      α
    3     3.0      α
>>> t.write('simple_encoded.fits')
>>> t2 = Table.read('simple_encoded.fits')
>>> t2.convert_bytestring_to_unicode()
>>> t2
<Table length=3>
  a      b     c  
int64 float64 str1
----- ------- ----
    1     1.0    α
    2     2.0    α
    3     3.0    α