UTF-8 encoding problems in Python, joining utf-8 with ascii string (interpolation actually)

Question

I have the following code:

u"[%s] - %s" % (a, b.encode('utf-8'))

Where a is a unicode string and b is a classical str

Now this gives the classical error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf6' in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)

(Position 2 belongs to a)

Why doesn't this work? I thought that if I make string b an unicode string, then it should n't have to convert to ascii when joining the strings together?

you might mean b.decode("utf-8"), to convert b bytestring to Unicode. In general, bytes -> decode() -> Unicode -> encode() -> bytes. — jfs
– jfs, Commented Jun 23, 2013 at 3:01

Alexander Kuzmin · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-23 08:26:58Z

1

This question was solved, basically I'm an idiot who doesn't know the difference between overloading the __str__() method and the __Unicode__() method. The whole error ocurred when everything was converted to str before it was returned from the method.

Leaving this answer here in case someone gets a similar problem and doesn't know about the __unicode__() magic method of classes.

answered Jun 23, 2013 at 8:26

Alexander Kuzmin

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2 Comments

Xavier Combelle Over a year ago

I wonder where the unicode is in the context of the question

Alexander Kuzmin Over a year ago

It's basically like this: def __str__(self): return u"[%s] - %s" % (a, b.encode('utf-8')), just replace __str__ with _unicode__ and everything works..

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