UnicodeDecodeError using Django smart_str with European letters

Question

I am getting the error

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 138: ordinal not in range(128)

when I try to do

from django.utils.encoding import smart_str

u'{}'.format(smart_str('ø'))

but the documentation says that the default encoding for this function is utf-8 which I thought should include 'ø'. I am using Django 1.11 on Python 2.7. What am I missing here?

What is your python and django version? I tried your code, but it didn't raise error. My python version is `3.7` and django version is `2.1.5` — Jrog, Feb 06 '19 at 16:12

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 06 '19 at 16:21

0

So reading this post I discovered that Python 2.7 (but not Python 3.x) has issues converting between utf-8 and unicode. Who'da thunk it? So I needed to decode my string before formatting it:

u'{}'.format(smart_str('ø').decode('utf-8'))

answered Feb 06 '19 at 16:21

wogsland

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UnicodeDecodeError using Django smart_str with European letters

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