UnicodeEncodeError write error in session_log (when unicode data is read in and then written to the session_log)

Hi @ktbyers

Not sure why but some or my older scripts are running into UnicodeEncodeError : “‘ascii’ codec can’t encode character ‘\xe3’ in position 45774: ordinal not in range(128)”. Snippet of code below

`deviceinfo = {‘device_type’: ‘cisco_wlc’, ‘ip’: wlcipadd, ‘username’: username, ‘password’: password, ‘banner_timeout’: 16, ‘global_delay_factor’: 4, ‘session_log’:filename}

device = netmiko.ConnectHandler(**deviceinfo)

op = device.send_command_timing(“show ap summary”, use_textfsm=False)`

[rb3123]

Hi @ktbyers

It seems our jump server was moved to a different data center pushing latency towards some WLC into 180 - 230ms zone. As netmiko has to fetch data over multiple iterations, some characters get malformed and fail to write into session logs on Windows (haven’t tested yet on Linux). This failure to write session log also causes entire driver to crash, terminating connection to WLC/switch. I have disabled session_log on driver level which has fixed the issue for us.

[ktbyers]

Naah, it clearly looks like a unicode write error:

File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/netmiko/base_connection.py", line 444, in _write_session_log
self.session_log.write(self.normalize_linefeeds(data))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u056e' in position 53: ordinal not in range(128)

i.e. there is unicode in the output of what is read back in and we are trying to write that out to the session_log. You probably could modify that behavior such that it writes out unicode (or strips unicode).