How do I fix this unicode/cPickle error in Python?

Question

ids = cPickle.loads(gem.value)

loads() argument 1 must be string, not unicode

Answer 1

cPickle.loads wants a byte string (which is exactly what cPickle.dumps outputs) and you're feeding it a unicode string instead. You'll need to "encode" that Unicode string to get back the byte string that dumps had originally given you, but it's hard to guess what encoding you accidentally imposed on it -- maybe latin-1 or utf-8 (if ascii don't worry, either of those two will decode it just great), maybe utf-16...? It's hard to guess without knowing what gem is and how you originally set its value from the output of a cPickle.dumps...!