Why does Django admin try to encode strings into ASCII rather than Unicode? Or is this error something different than it looks like?

Question

I've got the following error:

TemplateSyntaxError at /admin/results_cop/copsegmentresult/

Caught an exception while rendering: ('ascii', 'ISU European Figure Skating Championships 2009: Senior Ladies Ladies: Short Program - 2. Susanna P\xc3\x96YKI\xc3\x96', 98, 99, 'ordinal not in range(128)')

The fragment of the string that won't render is: PÖYKIÖ

What I don't get is why Django is trying to render the string as ASCII, why not UTF-8?

EDIT 1:

I forgot to ask - I'd also quite like to know how to get rid of the error ;)

EDIT 2:

Bobince's answer is correct :) I had something along the lines of:

def __unicode__(self):
    return "%s %s" (self.foo, self.bar)

Answer 1

I'm guessing you're asking Django to render a byte string. No u at the start of this:

'ISU European Figure Skating Championships 2009: Senior Ladies Ladies: Short Program - 2. Susanna P\xc3\x96YKI\xc3\x96'

So Django is probably trying to encode it to the page's encoding, presumably UTF-8. But byte strings can't be encoded directly; they have to be Unicode strings first. Python itself does this converting step using a default encoding which is typically ascii.

>>> 'P\xc3\x96YKI\xc3\x96'.encode('utf-8')
UnicodeDecodeError

So what you need to do is convert that byte string to a Unicode string yourself by UTF-8-decoding it, before it gets sent to the template. Where has it come from? Usually you should aim to keep all content strings inside your application as Unicode strings.