UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe7 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

I\'m having troubles in encoding characters in utf-8. I\'m using Django, and I get this error when I tried to send an Android notification with non-plain text. I tried to find w

Answer 1

Use u'...', without the u prefix it is byte-string not a unicode string.:

>>> u'ç'.encode('utf8')
'\xc3\xa7'

Answer 2

You're trying to encode / decode strings, not Unicode strings. The following statements do work:

u'ç'.encode('utf8')
u'á'.encode('utf-8')
unicode(u'ç')
u'ç'.encode('utf-8','ignore')