Question

I’ve downloaded the djangoappengine project sample django-guestbook from http://www.allbuttonspressed.com to test how it works but the following error message is shown when I to access the URL localhost:8000

Traceback (most recent call last):
File
“/usr/local/google_appengine/google/appengine/tools/dev_appserver.py”,
line 3245, in _HandleRequest
self._Dispatch(dispatcher, self.rfile, outfile, env_dict) File
“/usr/local/google_appengine/google/appengine/tools/dev_appserver.py”,
line 3186, in _Dispatch
base_env_dict=env_dict) File “/usr/local/google_appengine/google/appengine/tools/dev_appserver.py”,
line 531, in Dispatch
base_env_dict=base_env_dict) File
“/usr/local/google_appengine/google/appengine/tools/dev_appserver.py”,
line 2410, in Dispatch
self._module_dict) File “/usr/local/google_appengine/google/appengine/tools/dev_appserver.py”,
line 2299, in ExecuteCGI
os.environ.update(env) File “/usr/lib64/python2.6/os.py”, line
486, in update
self[k] = dict[k] File “/usr/lib64/python2.6/os.py”, line
471, in setitem
putenv(key, item) UnicodeEncodeError: ‘ascii’ codec
can’t encode character u’\xe1′ in
position 19: ordinal not in range(128)

My version of Django now is 1.3.0 alpha, but I firstly tested with the version 1.1.1 and the same error occurred. The command manage.py runserver ran ok, and I didn’t change nothing inside the project directory, I just downloaded, extracted e ran the server. I also tried to deploy the project (after change the app.yaml file, of course) but another error occurred.

Does someone have an idea of what could be happen? I tried everything I know for 7 uninterrupted hours, but I’m a little newbie yet. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Well u’\xe1′ is a lowercase A with an accent mark –> á

so my guess is that perhaps you used this character in a configuration file or you’ve stored the project in a directory that has the character in it? And then app engine is trying to use that in an environment variable name and that has to be ASCII.