How to fix: “UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte”

Question

as3:~/ngokevin-site# nano content/blog/20140114_test-chinese.mkd
as3:~/ngokevin-site# wok
Traceback (most recent call last):
File \"/usr/local/bin/wok\", line 4, in
         


        

Answer 1

In short, to ensure proper unicode handling in Python 2:

• use io.open for reading/writing files
• use from __future__ import unicode_literals
• configure other data inputs/outputs (e.g., databases, network) to use unicode
• if you cannot configure outputs to utf-8, convert your output for them print(text.encode('ascii', 'replace').decode())

For explanations, see @Alastair McCormack's detailed answer.