I am using Python-2.6 CGI
scripts but found this error in server log while doing json.dumps()
,
Traceback (most recent call last): File "/etc/mongodb/server/cgi-bin/getstats.py", line 135, in <module> print json.dumps(__getdata()) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 231, in dumps return _default_encoder.encode(obj) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 201, in encode chunks = self.iterencode(o, _one_shot=True) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 264, in iterencode return _iterencode(o, 0) UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xa5 in position 0: invalid start byte
Here ,
__getdata()
function returns dictionary {}
.
Before posting this question I have referred this of question os SO.
UPDATES
Following line is hurting JSON encoder,
now = datetime.datetime.now() now = datetime.datetime.strftime(now, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ') print json.dumps({'current_time': now}) # this is the culprit
I got a temporary fix for it
print json.dumps( {'old_time': now.encode('ISO-8859-1').strip() })
But I am not sure is it correct way to do it.
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Answer
The error is because there is some non-ascii character in the dictionary and it can’t be encoded/decoded. One simple way to avoid this error is to encode such strings with encode()
function as follows (if a
is the string with non-ascii character):
a.encode('utf-8').strip()