A somewhat tricky error to debug.
Take for example this:
>>> u"%s" % Product.objects.get(pk = 7431).manufacturer
u'DéLonghi'
Now look at it again.
>>> "%s" % Product.objects.get(pk = 7431).manufacturer
'D\xc3\xa9Longhi'
Did you spot the difference? There's a "u" in front of the string. That "u" tells Python you want it to be a unicode string rather than an ASCII string.
>>> product = Product.objects.get(pk = 7431)
>>> "%s %s" % (product.manufacturer, product.name)
Will throw this exception
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<console>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
Using the unicode string formatter:
>>> product = Product.objects.get(pk = 7431)
>>> u"%s %s" % (product.manufacturer, product.name)
u'D\xe9Longhi PLS130ARAUP'
Phew, that took a while to figure out. Now back to work!
