Question

I am using Google App Engine for Python, but I get a unicode error is there a way to work around it?
Here is my code:

def get(self):
    contents = db.GqlQuery("SELECT * FROM Content ORDER BY created DESC")
    output = StringIO.StringIO()
    with zipfile.ZipFile(output, 'w') as myzip:
        for content in contents:
            if content.code:
                code=content.code
            else:
                code=content.code2
            myzip.writestr("udacity_code", code)

    self.response.headers["Content-Type"] = "application/zip"
    self.response.headers['Content-Disposition'] = "attachment; filename=test.zip"
    self.response.out.write(output.getvalue())

I now get a unicode error:

UnicodeDecodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xf7 in position 12: ordinal not in range(128)

I believe it is coming from output.getvalue()… Is there a way to fix this?

Answer 1

@Areke Ignacio’s answer is the fix. For a brief walkthrough here is a post I did recently “Python and Unicode Punjabi” https://www.pippallabs.com/blog/python-and-unicode-panjabi