Flask: rendering unicode characters in template

In a Flask app I'm working on, I need to display Unicode text to users. When testing them out in the Python shell, my functions seem to work fine: ``` >>> sr = rym_scraper.get_artist_info('sigur ros') >>> print sr.name # a string encoded using str.encode('utf8') Sigur Rós ``` When I actually test it out in the app, I get this: ``` UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 3: ordinal not in range(128) ``` With the final exception being in the template it produces this stack trace: ``` Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Users/eric/Envs/whatshouldilistento/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py", line 1701, in __call__ return self.wsgi_app(environ, start_response) File "/Users/eric/Envs/whatshouldilistento/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py", line 1689, in wsgi_app response = self.make_response(self.handle_exception(e)) File "/Users/eric/Envs/whatshouldilistento/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py", line 1687, in wsgi_app response = self.full_dispatch_request() File "/Users/eric/Envs/whatshouldilistento/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py", line 1360, in full_dispatch_request rv = self.handle_user_exception(e) File "/Users/eric/Envs/whatshouldilistento/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py", line 1358, in full_dispatch_request rv = self.dispatch_request() File "/Users/eric/Envs/whatshouldilistento/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/app.py", line 1344, in dispatch_request return self.view_functions[rule.endpoint](**req.view_args) File "/Users/eric/projects/whatshouldilistento/app/app.py", line 29, in enter_band return band_info(form.name.data) File "/Users/eric/projects/whatshouldilistento/app/app.py", line 45, in band_info return render_template('band_info.html') File "/Users/eric/Envs/whatshouldilistento/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/templating.py", line 125, in render_template context, ctx.app) File "/Users/eric/Envs/whatshouldilistento/lib/python2.7/site-packages/flask/templating.py", line 107, in _render rv = template.render(context) File "/Users/eric/Envs/whatshouldilistento/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jinja2/environment.py", line 969, in render return self.environment.handle_exception(exc_info, True) File "/Users/eric/Envs/whatshouldilistento/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jinja2/environment.py", line 742, in handle_exception reraise(exc_type, exc_value, tb) File "/Users/eric/projects/whatshouldilistento/app/templates/band_info.html", line 9, in top-level template code <div>{{ message }}</div> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 3: ordinal not in range(128) ``` How can I display the Unicode string in my rendered template?