UnicodeDecodeError : 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe0 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

On one of my machines I have the error when I am working with google apps engine or django.

For example:

• app.yaml

  application: demas         
  
  
          

Answer 1

This is a bug in mimetypes, triggered by bad data in the registry. (рєфшю/AMR is not at all a valid MIME media type.)

ctype is a registry key name returned by _winreg.EnumKey, which mimetypes is expecting to be a Unicode string, but it isn't. Unlike _winreg.QueryValueEx, EnumKey returns a byte string (direct from the ANSI version of the Windows API; _winreg in Python 2 doesn't use the Unicode interfaces even though it returns Unicode strings, so it'll never read non-ANSI characters correctly).

So the attempt to .encode it fails with a Unicode​Decode​Error trying to get a Unicode string before encoding it back to ASCII!

try:
    ctype = ctype.encode(default_encoding) # omit in 3.x!
except UnicodeEncodeError:
    pass

These lines in mimetypes should simply be removed.

ETA: added to bug tracker.