UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode . . .

[quietlyconfident]

When I try to use python-pdfkit with certain HTML content that has certain characters in it, it fails with one of these errors if the html content is loaded into memory:

File ". . . /pdfkit.py", line 100, in to_pdf
    input = self.source.to_s().encode('utf-8')
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 64: ordinal not in range(128)

or

File ". . ./pdfkit.py", line 102, in to_pdf
    input = self.source.source.read().encode('utf-8')
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 64: ordinal not in range(128)

But, python pdfkit works just fine if it is provided with just a filename, and so does wkhtmltopdf.

I think that python pdfkit is doing something unsafe with strings; perhaps it should assume that the input is just bytes.

python-pdfkit error demo.zip

[debaetsr]

I have also problems when the source is already in utf-8 (encoding utf-8 to utf-8 gives weird results).

Removing the encode works for me. My HTML source files are in UTF-8, as we have many accents in Belgium.

I assume it's the programmers job to ensure correct encoding before calling the library, so he can be in complete control what to do if unsupported characters occur.

Regards,
Ruben

[patrickyan]

@debaetsr how did you fix the problem?

[alanhamlett]

Should be fixed on master branch with #81 and released in the next version.

[gbrowdy]

The commit you referenced deals with the decoding, whereas the problem stated here (which I am also having) is about the encode function in the to_pdf method.

[alexandrezia]

I'm also having this issue,
All my html files are already utf-8 as they are in Portuguese language.

[mdesjardins]

I am having the same problem, with the French language, also utf-8.

[JazzCore]

Should be fixed now.

Sorry that it took so long for me to get to it...