UnicodeDecodeError Django Error Collectstatic

Question

i have a problem. I use collectstatic for production. But i have this problem with a css file. UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe1 in position 240647: invalid continuation byte

But, i don't know why.

This is the traceback:

Post-processed 'tiempo_turco/stylesheets/foundation.css' as 'tiempo_turco/stylesheets/foundation.6f8a1d5c4dbc.css'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./manage.py", line 10, in <module>
execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
File "/home/tulipan/Proyectos/IspanyolHaber/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 399, in execute_from_command_line
utility.execute()
File "/home/tulipan/Proyectos/IspanyolHaber/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 392, in execute
self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
File "/home/tulipan/Proyectos/IspanyolHaber/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 242, in run_from_argv
self.execute(*args, **options.__dict__)
File "/home/tulipan/Proyectos/IspanyolHaber/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 285, in execute
output = self.handle(*args, **options)
File "/home/tulipan/Proyectos/IspanyolHaber/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 415, in handle
return self.handle_noargs(**options)
File "/home/tulipan/Proyectos/IspanyolHaber/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/management/commands/collectstatic.py", line 173, in handle_noargs
collected = self.collect()
File "/home/tulipan/Proyectos/IspanyolHaber/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/management/commands/collectstatic.py", line 119, in collect
for original_path, processed_path, processed in processor:
File "/home/tulipan/Proyectos/IspanyolHaber/lib/python3.4/site-packages/django/contrib/staticfiles/storage.py", line 251, in post_process
content = original_file.read().decode(settings.FILE_CHARSET)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe1 in position 240647: invalid continuation byte

Thank you very much for your help!

UPDATE:

I try fix it deleting this css file, but, i deleted and i have the same error, i don't understand why!

Answer 1

Probably your CSS file is not really encoded as UTF8, most likely it is ISO-8859-1 in which the byte 0xE1 equates to á (LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE). You can check the file type with the file command, and then convert it to UTF8 using iconv :

$ cp tiempo_turco/stylesheets/foundation.css /tmp
$ file /tmp/foundation.css
/tmp/foundation.css: ISO-8859 text
$ iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF8  /tmp/foundation.css >/tmp/foundation_utf8.css
$ file /tmp/foundation_utf8.css
/tmp/foundation_utf8.css: UTF-8 Unicode text

Not sure about how to update the file in your installation - you said that you tried removing it without any change, so maybe you need to restart your server?

If you don't have iconv you can convert it to UTF8 in Python:

$ python
>>> css = open('/tmp/foundation.css').read().decode('iso-8859-1')
>>> open('/tmp/foundation_utf8.css', 'w').write(css.encode('utf8'))

Answer 2

I had the same error when I used django-pipeline inside docker container. It turned out that for some reason the system used POSIX locale. I used the solution proposed here and exported locale setting in system shell:

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

It worked well. Also, notice I did that both in docker and outside machine.

Answer 3

Django has a good function for converting strings to unicode. Try out this function

from from django.utils.encoding import smart_unicode

smart_unicode(value)