encoding/decoding strings in python

Question

I have a function that returns a utf-16 encoded string and I have to include its result into another string by a replace:

string = myfunc()

debug_string = debug_string.replace("$rep$", string)

In my eclipse environment it works fine, but in another environment it gives an error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe0' in position 23: ordinal not in range(128)

Do you know what is the possible cause?

Thanks

Answer 1

Your string variable isn't in Unicode? Then you need to explicitly decode sequence of bytes (in UTF-16 encoding) from string (string type) to Unicode object:

u_string = myfunc().decode('utf-16')

debug_string also should be in Unicode.