Django: Non-ASCII character

Question

My Django View/Template is not able to handle special characters. The simple view below fails because of the ñ. I get below error:

Non-ASCII character

Answer 1

Insert at the top of views.py

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

And add "u" before your string

my_str = u"plus de détails"

Solved!

Answer 2

You need the coding comment Gabi mentioned and also use the unicode "u" sign before your string :

return HttpResponse(u'español')

The best page I found on the web explaining all the ASCII/Unicode mess is this one : http://www.stereoplex.com/blog/python-unicode-and-unicodedecodeerror

Enjoy!

Answer 3

I was struggling with the same issue as @dkgirl, yet despite making all of the changes suggested here I still could not get constant strings that I'd defined in settings.py that contain ñ to show up in pages rendered from my templates.

Instead I replaced every instance of "utf-8" in my python code from the above solutions to "ISO-8859-1" (Latin-1). It works fine now.

Odd since everything seems to indicate that ñ is supported by utf-8 (and in fact I'm still using utf-8 in my templates). Perhaps this is an issue only on older Django versions? I'm running 1.2 beta 1.

Any other ideas what may have caused the problem? Here's my old traceback:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "manage.py", line 4, in
import settings # Assumed to be in the same directory.
File "C:\dev\xxxxx\settings.py", line 53
('es', ugettext(u'Espa±ol') ),
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf1 in position 0: unexpected end of data

Answer 4

Set DEFAULT_CHARSET to 'utf-8' in your settings.py file.

Answer 5

The thing about encoding is that apart from declaring to use UTF-8 (via <meta> and the project's settings.py file) you should of course respect your declaration: make sure your files are saved using UTF-8 encoding.

The reason is simple: you tell the interpreter to do IO using a specific charset. When you didn't save your files with that charset, the interpreter will get lost.

Some IDEs and editors will use Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) by default, which explains why Ryan his answer could work. Although it's not a valid solution to the original question being asked, but a quick fix.

Answer 6

Do you have this at the beginning of your script:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

...?

See this: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/

EDIT: For the second problem, it's about the html encoding. Put this in the head of your html page (you should send the request as an html page, otherwise I don't think you will be able to output that character correctly):

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />