AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'encode'

I have a list of uni开发者_开发百科code objects and want to encode them to utf-8, but encoding doesn't seem to work.

the code is here :

>>> tmp = [u' test context']
>>> tmp.encode('utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'encode'
>>>

I can't understand why there is no attribute encode

You need to do encode on tmp[0], not on tmp.

tmp is not a string. It contains a (Unicode) string.

Try running type(tmp) and print dir(tmp) to see it for yourself.

You need to unicode each element of the list individually

[x.encode('utf-8') for x in tmp]