UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 8: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

I'm getting this error on this line:

logger.debug(u'__call__ with full_name={}, email={}'.format(full_name, email))

Why?

The contents of the name variable is Gonçalves.

Answer 1

The problem is that full_name is a str, not a unicode object.

# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
import logging

logging.basicConfig()
logger = logging.getLogger()
logger.warning('testing')

# unicode.format(str) raises an error
name = 'Gonçalves'
print type(name)
print name
try:
    message = u'{}'.format(name)
except UnicodeDecodeError as e:
    print e

# but logger(unicode) is fine
logging.warn(u'Gonçalves')

# so unicode.format(str.decode()) doesn't raise
name = 'Gonçalves'
print type(name)
print name
message = u'{}'.format(name.decode('utf-8'))
logging.warning(message)


# and neither does unicode.format(unicode)
name = u'Gonçalves'
print type(name)
print name
message = u'{}'.format(name)
logging.warning(message)

Answer 2

This should fix your problem:

full_name, email = [unicode(x, 'utf-8') for x in [full_name, email]]

logger.debug(u'__call__ with full_name={}, email={}'.format(full_name, email))

The problem was that the default encoding of unicode strings is ASCII, which only supports 128 characters. Using UTF-8 will fix this problem.

Disclaimer This could be wrong on specifics, I code in py3 only. Learned all this in about 5 mins.