Instapy: UnicodeEncodeError: ordinal not in range(128)

[tibor]

Seems like emoji aren’t working on my VPS:

File "/home/tibor/InstaPy/instapy/instapy.py", line 306, in like_by_tags
    commented += comment_image(self.browser, comments)
  File "/home/tibor/InstaPy/instapy/comment_util.py", line 17, in comment_image
    print(u'--> Commented: {}'.format(rand_comment))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u270c' in position 23: ordinal not in range(128)

Does anyone has an idea why this isn’t working?

On the Python FAQ I found this quote:

These messages usually means that you’re trying to either mix Unicode strings with 8-bit strings, or is trying to write Unicode strings to an output file or device that only handles ASCII.
When you do this, Python will usually assume that the 8-bit string contains ASCII data only, and will raise an error if this is not the case.

[tibor]

Sorry, found the answer myself. I guess we should think about a small FAQ in addition to the quickstart guide.

[timgrossmann]

@tibor could you please quickly write what the answer was? (For future issues)

[tibor]

I thought it would work with the solution from hariom282538 from #45:

set PYTHONIOENCODING=UTF-8

Unfortunately, chrome crashes then.

[tibor]

At the moment, my server setup is as following:

$ locale
LANG=C
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_PAPER="C"
LC_NAME="C"
LC_ADDRESS="C"
LC_TELEPHONE="C"
LC_MEASUREMENT="C"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="C"
LC_ALL=

Would I have to change anything here?

[timgrossmann]

@tibor LC_ALLshould definitely be en_US.UTF-8

[tibor]

Now it seems to work.
My steps were:

$ localedef -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8
$ export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

[timgrossmann]

@tibor Perfect, thank you for the reply!

[hojabbr]

Just add these lines to quickstart.py and instapy.py:

# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

[JMuffin]

@hojjabr this is a great solution - thanks :)