UnicodeDecodeError when I rename a plone site's name

Question

Plone 4.2.5 upgraded from 4.1.4, default_language is zh-cn, default_charset is utf-8 (portal_properties/site_properties). when I try to rename a Plone site's name in the root page at ip:8080/, a site error is shown: ``` An error was encountered while publishing this resource. Error Type: UnicodeDecodeError Error Value: ('ascii', '\xe8\xa2\x81\xe4\xba\x88\xe6\xb9\x98', 0, 1, 'ordinal not in range(128)') Traceback (innermost last): Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 126, in publish Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 77, in mapply Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 46, in call_object Module OFS.CopySupport, line 333, in manage_renameObjects Module OFS.CopySupport, line 369, in manage_renameObject Module zope.event, line 31, in notify Module zope.component.event, line 24, in dispatch Module zope.component._api, line 136, in subscribers Module zope.component.registry, line 321, in subscribers Module zope.interface.adapter, line 585, in subscribers Module zope.component.event, line 32, in objectEvent…

Accepted Answer

Your site, at some point, indexed unicode content into the Catalog indexes, effectively breaking them. This may have been due to an old Plone bug, or something an add-on or custom code did wrong.

You can try to run a full reindex with the default Python encoding set to UTF-8 to work around this. The following is not a recommended procedure for production sites; this is just a temporary 'plaster' for your problem.

In your Python `site-packages` directory, add a file named `sitecustomize.py` with the contents:

```
import sys

sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')
```

then restart your plone site and attempt the rename or do a full catalog reindex first.

Do remember to remove the `sitecustomize.py` file again. Setting the default encoding in Python is only going to mask future problems.

UnicodeDecodeError when I rename a plone site's name

Solution

Problem