UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe5 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

I am building a web application using Flask and Google App Engine. One of the pages in this web application makes a call via YouTube APIs to get videos given a search term.

Answer 1

Figured it out.

I put the following at the start of my python file

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

Answer 2

From the docs: Jinja2 is using Unicode internally which means that you have to pass Unicode objects to the render function or bytestrings that only consist of ASCII characters.

A normal string in Python 2.x is a bytestring. To make it unicode use:

byte_string = 'a Python string which contains non-ascii data like €äãü'
unicode_string = byte_string.decode('utf-8')

More: http://blog.notdot.net/2010/07/Getting-unicode-right-in-Python