UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe5 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

I am building a web application using Flask and Google App Engine. One of the pages in this web application makes a call via YouTube APIs to get videos given a search term.

I get the following error when I try to query YoutubeVids.html.

This only happens when when I pass a certain parameter via Jinja2 templates to the page.

file "/Users/xxxxx/App-Engine/src/templates/YoutubeVids.html", line 1, in top-level template code     {% extends "master.html" %} UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe5 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)  INFO     2014-01-27 22:39:40,963 module.py:612] default: "GET /xxx/yyyy HTTP/1.1" 500 291 

Answer 1

Figured it out.

I put the following at the start of my python file

import sys reload(sys) sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8") 

Answer 2

From the docs: Jinja2 is using Unicode internally which means that you have to pass Unicode objects to the render function or bytestrings that only consist of ASCII characters.

A normal string in Python 2.x is a bytestring. To make it unicode use:

byte_string = 'a Python string which contains non-ascii data like €äãü' unicode_string = byte_string.decode('utf-8') 

More: http://blog.notdot.net/2010/07/Getting-unicode-right-in-Python