UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

I\'m having problems dealing with unicode characters from text fetched from different web pages (on different sites). I am using BeautifulSoup.

The problem is that

Answer 1

We struck this error when running manage.py migrate in Django with localized fixtures.

Our source contained the # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- declaration, MySQL was correctly configured for utf8 and Ubuntu had the appropriate language pack and values in /etc/default/locale.

The issue was simply that the Django container (we use docker) was missing the LANG env var.

Setting LANG to en_US.UTF-8 and restarting the container before re-running migrations fixed the problem.