Question

it works fine on 64 bit machines but for some reason will not work on python 2.4.3 on a 32-bit instance.

i get the error

'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position 76-79: invalid data

for the code

try:        
    str(sourceresult.sourcename).encode('utf8','replace')
except:
    raise Exception(  repr(sourceresult.sourcename ) )

it returns ‘kazamidori blog\xf9’

i have modified my site.py file to make UTF8 the default encoding, but still doesnt seem to be working.

Answer 1

We need the following, and we need the exact output:

type(sourceresult.sourcename) # I suspect it's already a UTF-8 encoded string

repr(sourceresult.sourcename)

Like I said, I’m almost certain that your sourceresult.sourcename is already a UTF-8 encoded string.

Perhaps this might help a little.

EDIT: it seems your sourceresult.sourcename is encoded as cp1252. I don’t know what mystring (that you reference in a comment) is.
So, to get a UTF-8 encoded string, you need to do:

source_as_UTF8= sourceresult.sourcename.decode("cp1252").encode("utf-8")

However, the string being cp1252-encoded is not consistent with the error message you supplied.