Printing unicode characters from SQL in Excel with xlwt
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I am using Python to extract data from an MSSQL database, using an ODBC connection. I am then trying to put the extracted data into an Excel file, using xlwt.

However this generates the following error:

    UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd8 in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)

I have run the script to just print the data and established that the offending character in the database is an O with a slash through it. On the python print it shows as "\xd8".

The worksheet encoding for xlwt is set as UTF-8.

Is there any way to have this come straight through into Excel?