How to fix: “UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte”

Question

as3:~/ngokevin-site# nano content/blog/20140114_test-chinese.mkd
as3:~/ngokevin-site# wok
Traceback (most recent call last):
File \"/usr/local/bin/wok\", line 4, in
         


        

Answer 1

"UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte"

Cause of this error: input_string must be unicode but str was given

"TypeError: Decoding Unicode is not supported"

Cause of this error: trying to convert unicode input_string into unicode

---

So first check that your input_string is str and convert to unicode if necessary:

if isinstance(input_string, str):
   input_string = unicode(input_string, 'utf-8')

Secondly, the above just changes the type but does not remove non ascii characters. If you want to remove non-ascii characters:

if isinstance(input_string, str):
   input_string = input_string.decode('ascii', 'ignore').encode('ascii') #note: this removes the character and encodes back to string.

elif isinstance(input_string, unicode):
   input_string = input_string.encode('ascii', 'ignore')