Modifying a forked Pyramid application that uses MySQL to use a SQLite DB -- Unicode Decode Error

Question

I have a question that is a bit hard to explain. I'm forking devsniper's application 'customers' as a base to start a POS system for a local computer shop. The original application uses MySQL, however it is critical that this application uses my client's original data. So I am presented with two options:

1) I can migrate the SQLite Database to a MySQL DB
2) I can modify the program to use the SQLite DB (Preferred)

However, whenever I try to pull up the customers page, I get the following:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

I am not sure where to start with detailing my problem, as there isn't much detail in precisely what is causing this problem, however I will start with the traceback.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pyramid-1.4.2-py2.7.egg/pyramid/mako_templating.py", line    232, in __call__
result = template.render_unicode(**system)
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Mako-0.8.1-py2.7.egg/mako/template.py", line 452, in     render_unicode
as_unicode=True)
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Mako-0.8.1-py2.7.egg/mako/runtime.py", line 783, in _render
**_kwargs_for_callable(callable_, data))
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Mako-0.8.1-py2.7.egg/mako/runtime.py", line 815, in _render_context
_exec_template(inherit, lclcontext, args=args, kwargs=kwargs)
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Mako-0.8.1-py2.7.egg/mako/runtime.py", line 841, in _exec_template
callable_(context, *args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/customers/customers/templates/base/index.html", line 102, in render_body
${next.body()}
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/customers/customers/templates/customer/list.html", line 19, in render_body
<%include file="listPartial.html"/>
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Mako-0.8.1-py2.7.egg/mako/runtime.py", line 710, in _include_file
callable_(ctx, **_kwargs_for_include(callable_, context._data, **kwargs))
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/customers/customers/templates/customer/listPartial.html", line 50, in render_body
${pager(customers)}
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/customers/customers/templates/base/uiHelpers.html", line 10, in render_pager
${items.pager(format="$link_previous ~2~ $link_next",
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/WebHelpers-1.3-py2.7.egg/webhelpers/paginate.py", line 716, in pager
    self._pagerlink(self.next_page, symbol_next) or ''
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/WebHelpers-1.3-py2.7.egg/webhelpers/paginate.py", line 855, in _pagerlink
return HTML.a(text, href=link_url, onclick=onclick_action, **self.link_attr)
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/WebHelpers-1.3-py2.7.egg/webhelpers/html/builder.py", line 213, in __call__
return make_tag(self._tag, *args, **kw)
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/WebHelpers-1.3-py2.7.egg/webhelpers/html/builder.py", line 308, in make_tag
chunks.extend(escape(x) for x in args)
  File "/home/tabras/posenv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/WebHelpers-1.3-py2.7.egg/webhelpers/html/builder.py", line 308, in <genexpr>
chunks.extend(escape(x) for x in args)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Post Solution Edit:

The problem was here:

${items.pager(format="$link_previous ~2~ $link_next", 
                  symbol_previous="«", 
                  symbol_next="»",
                  link_attr=link_attr,
                  curpage_attr=curpage_attr,
                  dotdot_attr=dotdot_attr,
                  onclick="$('.list-partial').load('%s'); return false;")}

For some reason the '»' character and its counterpart were giving throwing the error. I simply changed them to standard ascii characters and everything was golden.

Answer 1

Yeah, you were right about slowing down Michael -- It was a really simple error. In uiHelpers.html there was a unicode character '»' which was causing the problem for some reason.. Simply changed that to '>' and it was golden. This was a good lesson in reading the traceback more carefully, thanks for the feedback.

-Tabras