UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 1: invalid continuation byte in Django

Question

This is very possibly a duplicate, since I saw a certain amount of similar questions but I can't seem to find a solution.

My problem is as stated in the description. I am working on a Django project on python 3.8.5. My professor wanted me to program a website and use PostgreSQL as db. I did use it but I always got the following error when I used python manage.py runserver .

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 1: invalid continuation byte

I uninstalled PostgreSQL and tryed to start a older project of mine that uses sqlite3, but it did not work and threw the same error. Following the stack trace.

Exception in thread django-main-thread:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\Startklar\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\lib\threading.py", line 932, in _bootstrap_inner
    self.run()
  File "C:\Users\Startklar\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\lib\threading.py", line 870, in run
    self._target(*self._args, **self._kwargs)
  File "C:\Users\Startklar\PycharmProject\Modul133_Movie\venv\lib\site-packages\django\utils\autoreload.py", line 53, in wrapper
    fn(*args, **kwargs)
  File "C:\Users\Startklar\PycharmProject\Modul133_Movie\venv\lib\site-packages\django\core\management\commands\runserver.py", line 139, in inner_run
    run(self.addr, int(self.port), handler,
  File "C:\Users\Startklar\PycharmProject\Modul133_Movie\venv\lib\site-packages\django\core\servers\basehttp.py", line 206, in run
    httpd = httpd_cls(server_address, WSGIRequestHandler, ipv6=ipv6)
  File "C:\Users\Startklar\PycharmProject\Modul133_Movie\venv\lib\site-packages\django\core\servers\basehttp.py", line 67, in __init__
    super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
  File "C:\Users\Startklar\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\lib\socketserver.py", line 452, in __init__
    self.server_bind()
  File "C:\Users\Startklar\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\lib\wsgiref\simple_server.py", line 50, in server_bind
    HTTPServer.server_bind(self)
  File "C:\Users\Startklar\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\lib\http\server.py", line 140, in server_bind
    self.server_name = socket.getfqdn(host)
  File "C:\Users\Startklar\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\lib\socket.py", line 756, in getfqdn
    hostname, aliases, ipaddrs = gethostbyaddr(name)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 1: invalid continuation byte

I am running this entire thing locally on a Windows 10.

I have no clue whatsoever on how to solve this issue. I am really new to django and even my professor can't seem to help me. I have been looking through a variety of questions here in stack overflow and tried a numbers of things out but I can't seem to find a solution at all.

Every bit of help or advice is welcomed.

Answer 1

Your database table or columns may be using a different encoding. Try running the following query in SQL:

ALTER TABLE your_table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8;

This will change the character set of your table to UTF-8.

Also found an issue similar to yours:

Unicodedecodeerror with runserver

It may have to do with non-ASCII characters in the hostname or computer name.