Question

I’m having problems using {% ifequal s1 ‘some text’ %} to compare strings with extended characters in Django templates. When string s1 contains ascii characters >127, I get exceptions in the template rendering. What am I doing wrong? I’m using UTF-8 coding throughout the rest of application in both the data, templates and Python code without any problems.

views.py

def test(request):     return render_to_response('test.html', {                                             's1': 'dados',                                             's2': 'aprovação',                                             }                               ) 

test.html

s1={{s1}}<br> s2={{s2}}<br>  {% ifequal s1 'dados' %}   s1='dados' is true {% endifequal %}  {% ifequal s1 'aprovação' %}   s1='aprovação' is true {% endifequal %}  {% comment %} The following two comparions cause the following exception: Caught an exception while rendering: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 6: ordinal not in range(128)  {% ifequal s2 'dados' %}   s2='dados' is true {% endifequal %}  {% ifequal s2 'aprovação' %}   s2='aprovação' is true {% endifequal %} {% endcomment %}  {% ifequal s2 u'dados' %}   s2='dados' is true {% endifequal %}  {% comment %} The following comparison causes the following exception: Caught an exception while rendering: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 8-9: ordinal not in range(128) {% ifequal s2 u'aprovação' %}   s2='aprovação' is true {% endifequal %} {% endcomment %} 

Output

s1=dados s2=aprovação s1='dados' is true  

Answer 1

Sometimes there’s nothing like describing a problem to someone else to help you solve it. 🙂 I should have marked the Python strings as Unicode like this and everything works now:

def test(request):     return render_to_response('test.html', {                                             's1': u'dados',                                             's2': u'aprovação',                                             }                               )