Writing Unicode text to a text file?

Deal exclusively with unicode objects as much as possible by decoding things to unicode objects when you first get them and encoding them as necessary on the way out.

If your string is actually a unicode object, you'll need to convert it to a unicode-encoded string object before writing it to a file:

foo = u'Δ, Й, ק, ‎ م, ๗, あ, 叶, 葉, and 말.'
f = open('test', 'w')
f.write(foo.encode('utf8'))
f.close()

When you read that file again, you'll get a unicode-encoded string that you can decode to a unicode object:

f = file('test', 'r')
print f.read().decode('utf8')

In Python 2.6+, you could use io.open() that is default (builtin open()) on Python 3:

import io

with io.open(filename, 'w', encoding=character_encoding) as file:
    file.write(unicode_text)

It might be more convenient if you need to write the text incrementally (you don't need to call unicode_text.encode(character_encoding) multiple times). Unlike codecs module, io module has a proper universal newlines support.