Python/Django UnicodeDecodeError 'ascii' codec can't decode

Question

I got views.py:

# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
def myview(request):
    object = MyObject.objects.get(id = 1)
    testvar = u"test %s" % object.myfield

And I got error:

UnicodeDecodeError at /myurl
'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc4 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

Unicode error hint
The string that could not be encoded/decoded was: J������

J�� - myfield value In database this field is utf8_bin. In model this field is CharField

sys.getfilesystemencoding() #-  UTF-8
sys.getdefaultencoding() #- ascii
sys.getdefaultencoding() #- ascii
locale.getdefaultlocale() #- ('en_US', 'UTF-8')
locale.getlocale() #- (None, None)

Python 2.7.6 Django 1.5.8

I tried also:

object.myfield.decode("utf8")

And got error:

UnicodeEncodeError at /myurl
'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 6-10: ordinal not in range(128)

I have administration side of this object - and everything works perfect, even with utf-8 symbols.

And if I print out type of object.myfield, then i get:

<type 'str'>

I don't know about the first bit of your question, but the last bit where you get a "can't encode" while attempting to decode a value happens in Python 2.x when you try to decode a unicode string: Python will encode it first (with the ascii codec) so that it can attempt to decode it. That says to me your field is already unicode so the main problem probably isn't in the lines you showed us but elsewhere when something tries to encode the unicode value to ascii. — Duncan
– Duncan, Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 16:01
Is myfield a foreign key? If it is, can you post __str__() and __unicode__() of related model? — dani herrera
– dani herrera, Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 17:25
Duncan, my code throws first error till decode() part - in this part "u"test %s" % object.myfield" — user3564666
– user3564666, Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 20:58

kguest · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-24 23:33:46Z

1

Try this

def myview(request):
    object = MyObject.objects.get(id = 1)
    testvar = u"test %s" % object.myfield.**decode('utf-8')**

edited Apr 24, 2015 at 23:33

kguest

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answered Feb 5, 2015 at 0:09

Cem Yıldız

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Alastair McCormack Over a year ago

To make this a great answer, please explain what this does

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