UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters —03 June 2012

When coding in python, I’ve been hit by the following error every once in a while:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 25-28: ordinal not in range(128)

Today I finally figured why:

$ python -c 'import sys; print sys.stdout.encoding'
$ US-ASCII

Although my terminal application is capable of outputting unicode characters, python (2.6) somehow does not know it, and tries to output everything in ascii, hence the error. The solution is to set PYTHONIOENCODING in my ~/.bashrc:

export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8