UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe3

Question

I am facing this issue while running a mailing script in py 2.7 for the line...

msg.attach(MIMEText(welcome_msg + htmlMessageContent + footer_msg, 'html'))

Don't assume that the string is utf-8 encoded. See here: stackoverflow.com/questions/21129020/… — lhay86
– lhay86, Commented Feb 22, 2018 at 12:36
Possible duplicate of Python - Finding unicode/ascii problems — tripleee
– tripleee, Commented Feb 22, 2018 at 14:22

BoarGules · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-22 14:43:00Z

1

One of the elements of the string you are concatenating

welcome_msg + htmlMessageContent + footer_msg

is Unicode, and another of them isn't. When you concatenate the strings Python has convert them all to a common type (Unicode), much as it does when you add an integer to a float. But the default string conversion to Unicode is ascii, and if the string contains a non-ascii character it will fail.

Find out which string isn't Unicode. For this you can use type(). Wrap that string in a call to unicode() that explains how you want '\xe3' interpreted. For example, if '\xe3' should be interpreted as 'ã':

unicode(mystring, encoding='Latin-1')

Then your concatenation should work.

edited Feb 22, 2018 at 14:43

answered Feb 22, 2018 at 14:05

BoarGules

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4 Comments

tripleee Over a year ago

This obviously assumes the other stringtis Latin-1 which could be completely wrong. The real solution is to know what you have, and take it from there.

BoarGules Over a year ago

That was a guess, and a reasonable one. If OP doesn't want want '\xe3' interpreted as 'ã' then he will need to find the encoding he needs. But to provide a testable solution I had to put in a real encoding name. Answering a question at this level with encoding='your encoding goes here' is, in my opinion, not all that helpful. Your comment assumes that OP knows what an encoding is.

tripleee Over a year ago

The problem is more that the OP posted a fundamentally incomplete question, but IMHO, it bears pointing out that blindly applying a workaround without understanding it properly will just introduce new bugs.

kb hithesh Over a year ago

i had to encode the first and last strings in order to get rid of the errot

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