Cannot decode/encode in UTF-8.

Question

I have a text-box which allows users to enter a word.

The user enters: über

In the backend, I get the word like this:

def form_process(request):
    word = request.GET.get('the_word')
    word = word.encode('utf-8')
    #word = word.decode('utf-8')
    print word

For some reason, I cannot decode or encode this!! It gives me the error:

 UnicodeEncodeError
 ('ascii', u'\ufffd', 0, 1, 'ordinal not in range(128)')

Edit: When I do "repr(word)", this is what I get:

u'\ufffd'

Answer 1

Did you remember to put:

accept-charset="utf-8"

in the form tag?

EDIT: Is the DEFAULT_CHARSET in settings.py set to 'utf-8' ?

Answer 2

Previous post on this subject

"über".decode('cp1252').encode('utf-8')
'\xc3\xbcber'

Answer 3

Solved!

I had escape(word) ...in the javascript ...before I passed it to the server.

Answer 4

Is there any reason to use print word? If not, its should work without those lines.

def form_process(request):
    word = request.GET.get('the_word')