title: Has anyone been able to write out UTF-8 characters using python's xlwt?
body: <p>I'm trying to write data to an excel file that includes Japanese characters.
  I'm using codec.open() to get the data, and that seems to work fine, but I run into this error when I try to write the data:</p>
  
  <pre><code>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 16-17: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I don't understand why the program would be insisting on using ascii here. When I created a new workbook object, I did so using</p>
  
  <pre><code>wb = xlwt.Workbook(encoding='utf-8')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and both the program file itself and the file it's reading in are saved as UTF-8.</p>
  
  <p>Anybody have any ideas?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: Here's a link to the xlwt package. <a href="http://pypi.python.org/pypi/xlwt">http://pypi.python.org/pypi/xlwt</a></p>