UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc5

Question

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 537: ordinal not in range(128), referer: ...

I always get this error when I try to output my whole website with characters "č". I am using mako templating. What to do?

• Ulrich Eckhardt: possible duplicate of Python, UnicodeDecodeError

Answer 1

The error occurs because somewhere code coerces your unicode template string into a python 2 str; you need to encode the rendered template into an UTF-8 bytestring yourself:

if isinstance(rendered, unicode):
 rendered = rendered.encode('UTF-8')
# rendered is now guaranteed to be of type str

Answer 2

The problem is that your code cannot decode some of characters because of being more than 8 bits so try to use this:

converted = unicode("your_string", encoding="utf-8", errors="ignore")

Good luck

• Antti Haapala: Unfortunately this is the exact opposite of what OP needs to do.
• Mojtaba Yousefi: I'm afraid dear Antti. I think I wrote the solution belonged to the answer exactly. He wants his code to skip the Unicode which is more than one byte and this is the exact solution :)

Answer 3

Make sure you're running your script with the right locale settings, e.g.

$ locale -a | grep "^en_.\+UTF-8"
en_GB.UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8
$ export LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8
$ export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

Docs: man locale, man setlocale.

For Linux, also install a language pack, e.g. sudo apt-get install language-pack-en.

Answer 4

You can replace your special characters č with this code: č

"your string".replace('č','č')

if you are working on a web site u can create a sanytize function for all the special characters.