Thanks David. I've looked at a number of resources for troubleshooting this, and have read that utf-8 is used, but I have not been successful at placing that specification in my code in a way that works. Where in the code should this be specified? Below is my code, up to the point of failure:
# import the modules, including ones that hopefully troubleshoot the unicode encoding error
import arcpy
from arcpy import da
import csv
import codecs
import os
import fileinput
import sys
# set the workspace environments
# file location
arcpy.env.workspace = r"C:workspace"
# overwrite files of the same name in the output location
arcpy.env.overwriteOutput = True
# transfer the domains and descriptions to shapefile headers and attributes
arcpy.env.transferDomains = True
#define the input feature classes output file names and types as variables
in_gdb = r"C:In.gdb"
in_sites = f"{in_gdb}/WSPRC_CulturalResources/ResourcePolyRecordedUpdated"
sites_shp = f"{arcpy.env.workspace}/ResourcePolyRecordedUpdated.shp"
out_sites_temp = f"{arcpy.env.workspace}/DoNotModify_CurrentSitesListTemp.csv"
out_sites = f"{arcpy.env.workspace}/DoNotModify_CurrentSitesList.csv"
## export the feature classes to shapefiles
arcpy.conversion.FeatureClassToShapefile(in_sites, arcpy.env.workspace)
# delete the unnecessary fields from the exported shapefiles
arcpy.management.DeleteField(sites_shp, ["Shape_Leng", "Shape_Area"])
#write the csv
with open(out_sites_temp, "w") as csvfile:
csvwriter = csv.writer(csvfile, delimiter=',', lineterminator='\n')
## Write field name header line
fields = ['ProjName', 'Date', 'Acreage', 'Notes']
csvwriter.writerow(fields),
## Write data rows
with arcpy.da.SearchCursor(sites_shp, fields) as s_cursor:
for row in s_cursor:
csvwriter.writerow(row)
