Reading Unicode data from server and writing to a file

Hello,
I am fetching some strings from a server which have one utf-8 character. What I need to do is split on that UTF character and store the parts separately at 2 different places.
For example: 詳細2.3

The '' in the above string is nothing but U+F8FF unicode character (UTF8: EF A3 BF)

I need to split the string on unicode character.
Here is my code:
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text = open(r"C:\tempchar.txt").read()

newpart = text.decode('utf-8').split(u"\uf8ff")
firstpart = newpart[::2] #some manipulation on this later
secondpart = newpart[1::2] #some manipulation on this later

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When I try this on a sample string from the text file as done in the code above, it works fine. And I can print the text on cmd prompt.

But, when I do the same thing with the input string from a server, I get the following error:
"UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-9: ordinal not in range(128)

I have never seen this error before and have no idea what could be causing this. PLEASE HELP!

I would think that if you read information into a_variable from the server and showed its type

print(type(a_variable))

the answer would differ from the type

print(type(open(r"C:\tempchar.txt").read()))

Once you knew this you'd have the clues you need to find the solution.

Thanks for your reply.
It shows <type 'unicode'> for all strings that I read from the server.

Great, you performed half of the experiment. The half I couldn't.

You're using python2. We know this because you have a unicode string that's invalid in python3.

The data type resulting from read in your test is str.

>>> print(type(open('/tmp/c.c').read()))
<type 'str'>

Got it? Your server gives unicode, your console example uses str. This python2 statement works as I'd expect:

>>> u'詳細2.3'.split(u'')
[u'\u8a73\u7d30', u'2.3']


Note to vision impaired yet gentle readers: The bit that appears as an empty string contains a narrow space character:

>>> ord(u'')
63743

I see. However, the test with the input file works just perfect.

The error message appears only when I read the strings from the server in my code.
The error message says ""UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-9: ordinal not in range(128)"