UTF-32 in Python
python, unicode
Solution
If you're getting this exception, then you're trying to call `.decode()` on a unicode string. You should only call `.decode()` on a byte string, and only call `.encode()` on a unicode string. Otherwise, the interpreter will first implicitly encode or decode the string using the default codec (usually 'ascii'), which is bad news.
In general, I recommend reading http://farmdev.com/talks/unicode/ carefully...
Problem
I cannot display theunicode item `u'\u201d'`. I didn't have problems with other unicode items. I used UTF-8, but then this character shows up and rained hell on my code. I tried different things in the interpreter. But basically where: ``` c = u'\u201d' ``` I get this error: ``` Traceback (most recent call last): File "<pyshell#154>", line 1, in <module> c.decode('utf-32') File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\utf_32.py", line 11, in decode return codecs.utf_32_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u201d' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128) ``` I need to display it in the GUI so I can check the output and then store it as plain text. Transform unicode string in python explains a bit, however I am still clearly missing something.