UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte

Question

I'm using Django and ajax to print data to an HTML table with jQuery and JSON.

It was working until new data came and had "ú@ñ" type of characters and I got: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf9 in position 4: invalid start byte

I've read and tried many different possible reasons and it's still not working.

I've tried:

• saving my file in UTF-8 in Sublime Text and with a file -bi myfile I still get text/x-python; charset=us-ascii
• using # -*- encoding: utf-8 -*- at the beginning of my views.py
• changing MySQL charset to CHARSET=utf8mb4 from CHARSET=latin1
• json.dumps(list(rows), default=datetime_handler), content_type="application/json", encoding='utf-8')

I'd rather avoid using .decode() for every string in my data but if there's no other solution, it's what I'll have to do.

Answer 1

-- encoding: utf-8

Is changing only encoding of the source file, meaning you can define variables/comments using non-ascii chars.

You can try to use

json.dumps(..., ensure_ascii=False, encoding="ISO-8859-1")