How to solve UnicodeDecodeError in mezzanine?

Question

I am using mezzanine cms. When I scrap the data from the blogspot I got this error

blog_id: sanavitastudio
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/nyros/hs/git_br/2013/Oct-9/healersource/apps/blog_hs/forms.py", line 226, in save
    blog_id=blog_id)
  File "/home/nyros/hs/1a9pinaxenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 150, in call_command
    return klass.execute(*args, **defaults)
  File "/home/nyros/hs/1a9pinaxenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 232, in execute
    output = self.handle(*args, **options)
  File "/home/nyros/hs/git_br/mezzanine/mezzanine/blog/management/base.py", line 172, in handle
    post, created = BlogPost.objects.get_or_create(**initial)
  File "/home/nyros/hs/1a9pinaxenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/db/models/manager.py", line 134, in get_or_create
    return self.get_query_set().get_or_create(**kwargs)
  File "/home/nyros/hs/1a9pinaxenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/db/models/query.py", line 452, in get_or_create
    obj.save(force_insert=True, using=self.db)
  File "/home/nyros/hs/git_br/mezzanine/mezzanine/core/models.py", line 221, in save
    super(Displayable, self).save(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/nyros/hs/git_br/mezzanine/mezzanine/core/models.py", line 77, in save
    super(Slugged, self).save(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/nyros/hs/git_br/mezzanine/mezzanine/core/models.py", line 46, in save
    super(SiteRelated, self).save(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/nyros/hs/git_br/mezzanine/mezzanine/core/models.py", line 116, in save
    self.description = strip_tags(self.description_from_content())
  File "/home/nyros/hs/git_br/mezzanine/mezzanine/core/models.py", line 146, in description_from_content
    description = unicode(self)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 5: ordinal not in range(128)

Code:

            import xmltest
            blog_id = xmltest.blogname(self.cleaned_data['blog_id'])

            print(type(blog_id))
            call_command(
                'import_blogger_hs',
                mezzanine_user=request.user.username,
                blog_id=blog_id)
            return False

And blogname method for If you give blogname it will automatically scrap the blogID and it is represented as blog_id.

Answer 1

Ah, so now with the code the problem is most likely with request.user.username unfortunately the mezzanine code assumes it is receiving an ascii object (what unicode(self) in the stacktrace is doing) and is "double encoding" it... grrr!

I would call your method the same way but do this:

call_command(
    'import_blogger_hs',
    mezzanine_user=request.user.username.decode('utf-8'),
    blog_id=blog_id)

Does that fix the issue?