[1.7.x] Fixed #22880 -- Added FAQ entry about UnicodeDecodeError

Thanks Víðir Valberg Guðmundsson for the report and
Tim Graham for the review.
Backport of 460ec09d2e from master.
This commit is contained in:
Claude Paroz 2014-06-23 09:28:42 +02:00
parent 48a2e027bf
commit 198ce3073c
1 changed files with 35 additions and 0 deletions

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@ -49,3 +49,38 @@ use the full path to the file, like so:
``python C:\pythonXY\Scripts\django-admin.py``.
.. _virtualenv: http://www.virtualenv.org/
Miscellaneous
=============
I'm getting a ``UnicodeDecodeError``. What am I doing wrong?
------------------------------------------------------------
This class of errors happen when a bytestring containing non-ASCII sequences is
transformed into a Unicode string and the specified encoding is incorrect. The
output generally looks like this::
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x?? in position ?:
ordinal not in range(128)
The resolution mostly depends on the context, however here are two common
pitfalls producing this error:
* Your system locale may be a default ASCII locale, like the "C" locale on
UNIX-like systems (can be checked by the ``locale`` command). If it's the
case, please refer to your system documentation to learn how you can change
this to a UTF-8 locale.
* You created raw bytestrings, which is easy to do on Python 2::
my_string = 'café'
Either use the ``u''`` prefix or even better, add the
``from __future__ import unicode_literals`` line at the top of your file
so that your code will be compatible with Python 3.2 which doesn't support
the ``u''`` prefix.
Related resources:
* :doc:`Unicode in Django </ref/unicode>`
* https://wiki.python.org/moin/UnicodeDecodeError