UnicodeDecodeError when using django forms

Question

I am trying to render a form in django and encounter a UnicodeDecodeError:'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe7

below is my forms.py:

from models import Country, Question
class QuestionForm(forms.ModelForm):
  ...
  country=forms.ModelMultipleChoiceField(queryset=Country.objects.all())
  # The above queryset will return a list of names in Chinese
  class Meta:
    model=Question
    field=(...,'country')

also, my models.py

class Country(models.Model):
  country_name=models.CharField(max_length=100)
  country_pic=models.ImageField(upload_to='country_pic/')

  def __unicode__(self):
      return self.country_name

class Question(models.Model):
  country=models.ForeignKey(Country)
  question_title=models.CharField(max_length=100)

  def __unicode__(self):
      return self.question_title

I also included #coding: utf-8 in each file but that is not solving the problem

below is the error message:

Environment:


Request Method: POST
Request URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000/website/add_question/

Django Version: 1.7.4
Python Version: 2.7.6
Installed Applications:
('django.contrib.admin',
 'django.contrib.auth',
 'django.contrib.contenttypes',
 'django.contrib.sessions',
 'django.contrib.messages',
 'django.contrib.staticfiles',
 'website')
Installed Middleware:
('django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
 'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
 'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
 'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
 'django.contrib.auth.middleware.SessionAuthenticationMiddleware',
 'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
 'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware')


Traceback:
File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py" in get_response
  111.                     response = wrapped_callback(request, *callback_args, **callback_kwargs)
File "/Users/qiaoweiliu/Desktop/FinalProject/ask/website/views.py" in add_question
  64.         if form.is_valid():
File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/django/forms/forms.py" in is_valid
  162.         return self.is_bound and not bool(self.errors)
File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/django/forms/forms.py" in errors
  154.             self.full_clean()
File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/django/forms/forms.py" in full_clean
  355.         self._post_clean()
File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/django/forms/models.py" in _post_clean
  406.         self.instance = construct_instance(self, self.instance, opts.fields, opts.exclude)
File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/django/forms/models.py" in construct_instance
  60.             f.save_form_data(instance, cleaned_data[f.name])
File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/django/db/models/fields/__init__.py" in save_form_data
  804.         setattr(instance, self.name, data)
File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/django/db/models/fields/related.py" in __set__
  597.                     self.field.rel.to._meta.object_name,

Exception Type: UnicodeDecodeError at /website/add_question/
Exception Value: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe7 in position 11: ordinal not in range(128

Welcome to StackOverflow! Can you include the error stack trace? — David Wolever, Mar 04 '15 at 19:25
I think that explicitly declaring your encoding at the top of your script only helps with handling Chinese text in the body of the script itself like if you have actually typed Chinese characters in the file, not with handling any strings that come from other sources. — elethan, Mar 19 '15 at 15:01

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 19 '15 at 14:27

I don't have much experience with Django, but I have dealt with that exception a lot when working with Chinese text in Python. Usually you need to use decode() with a Chinese codec. I have found that 'gb18030' works most frequently. So e.g., if you have a variable foo that holds Chinese strings, try foo.decode('gb18030')

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 12 '18 at 15:43

I know this is a bit old, but I was able to solve a similar error, using in top of forms.py the lines:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import unicode_literals

A similar error was reported here: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)

UnicodeDecodeError when using django forms

2 Answers2