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 a Django (1.9.10)/Python 2.7.5 project I have frequent UnicodeDecodeError exceptions; mainly when I try to feed unicode strings to logging. I made a helper function for arbitrary objects to basically format to 8-bit ascii strings and replacing any characters not in the table to '?'. I think it's not the best solution but since the default encoding is ascii (and i don't want to change it) it will do:

def encode_for_logging(c, encoding='ascii'):
    if isinstance(c, basestring):
        return c.encode(encoding, 'replace')
    elif isinstance(c, Iterable):
        c_ = []
        for v in c:
            c_.append(encode_for_logging(v, encoding))
        return c_
    else:
        return encode_for_logging(unicode(c))

`