The Definitive Guide to Pylons

Chapter 10. Unicode

If you've ever come across text in a foreign language that contains lots of question mark characters in unexpected positions or if you've written Python code that causes an exception such as the following one to be raised, then chances are you have run into a problem with character sets, encodings, and Unicode:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 6:

ordinal not in range(128)

Many developers try to avoid getting involved with Unicode because these error messages seem obscure and difficult to fix, but the good news is that Python has great Unicode support, so with a little effort, you will be able ...