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

I had the same error, with URLs containing non-ascii chars (bytes with values > 128), my solution:

url = url.decode('utf8').encode('utf-8')

Note: utf-8, utf8 are simply aliases . Using only 'utf8' or 'utf-8' should work in the same way

In my case, worked for me, in Python 2.7, I suppose this assignment changed 'something' in the str internal representation--i.e., it forces the right decoding of the backed byte sequence in url and finally puts the string into a utf-8 str with all the magic in the right place. Unicode in Python is black magic for me. Hope useful