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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T02:58:19+00:00

I’m fairly new to Apache as a whole, since I’ve only just started Web

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I’m fairly new to Apache as a whole, since I’ve only just started Web Developing, so please ask for more details if I haven’t provided enough.

I am using the out-of the box Apache that ships with Lion, and I have created a Python application that, every once in a while, needs to print out a UTF-8 character.

However, no matter what method I use, or how much I try, when ever I try to print out a UTF-8 character, it will throw out a 500 Internal Server Error, and I will be left with nothing.

The various things I’ve tried:

  • Printing out the character directly from the Python code (With the # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- at the top of the code.)
  • Printing out the character using the .decode('utf-8') function. (Which results in printing out 3 seperate characters.)
  • Printing out a placeholder, and then printing out Jquery which would replace the placeholder with the Symbol (And the page throws up an Internal Server Error)
  • Printing out a placeholder, and then printing out a link to a Jquery script which would replace it. (Firebug says that Firefox gets a 500 Server Error when trying to access the script.)

I cannot think of anything else.
That’s why I’ve asked here.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
~DragonXDoom

EDIT: After trying out Will’s suggestion below, I now get the following error.

<type 'exceptions.UnicodeDecodeError'>: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
  args = ('ascii', '\xe2\x80\xa2', 0, 1, 'ordinal not in range(128)')
  encoding = 'ascii'
  end = 1
  message = ''
  object = '\xe2\x80\xa2'
  reason = 'ordinal not in range(128)'
  start = 0
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You must read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html so that you have some understanding of the general problem.

    Once you’ve understood that, then you should learn how to handle unicode correctly in Python, I think the following website should be useful, although lengthy: http://boodebr.org/main/python/all-about-python-and-unicode

    Whatever you do, please do NOT skimp or skip on understanding unicode – otherwise you will continue to have subtle issues.

    Furthermore, you state that you’ve attempted to use .decode(‘utf-8’) – this won’t work if python has /already/ understood the data as unicode – you want to encode it!

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