Question

I’m trying to put a degree sign into a string that gets passed to a template. I’ve tried ° which of course got escaped. Then I tried using \u00b0 and \xb0 like so:

def __str__(self):
    return u"%s (%s \xb0C to %s \xb0C)" % \
        (self.name, self.min_deg_c, self.max_deg_c)

Both of these have resulted in:

'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xb0' in position 14: ordinal not in range(128)

Ideally django would just turn \xb0 into ° when escaping. What can I do to get this result? I don’t want to turn off escaping.

Answer 1

You can’t return unicode from a __str__ method (assuming you’re using Python 2.x). You should use the __unicode__ method.