django - UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character

Question

When uploading files with non-ASCII characters I get UnicodeEncodeError:

Exception Type: UnicodeEncodeError at /admin/studio/newsitem/add/
Exception Value: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'xf8' in position 78: ordinal not in range(128)

See full stack trace.

I run Django 1.2 with MySQL and nginx and FastCGI.

This is a problem that is fixed according to the Django Trac database, but I still have the problem. Any suggestions on how to fix are welcome.

EDIT: This is my image field:

image = models.ImageField(_('image'), upload_to='uploads/images', max_length=100)

Answer 1

For anyone encountering this problem when running Django with Supervisor, the solution is to add e.g. the following to the supervisord section of Supervisor's configuration:

environment=LANG="en_US.utf8", LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8", LC_LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

This solved the problem for me in Supervisor 3.0a8 running on Debian Squeeze.

Also make sure Supervisor re-reads the configuration by running:

supervisorctl reread
supervisorctl restart myservice

(thanks @Udi)

---

For upstart, add in your /etc/init/myservice.conf:

env LANG="en_US.utf8"
env LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
env LC_LANG="en_US.UTF-8"`

(thanks @Andrii Zarubin; see Environment Variables in Upstart documentation for more information)