django deserialize tries to encode input as ascii?

Question

The code:

>>> from django.core import serializers
>>> objects = serializers.deserialize('xml', fixturestr)
>>> o = next(objects)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<console>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/home/marcintustin/oneclickrep/oneclickcosvirt/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/serializers/xml_serializer.py", line 156, in next
    for event, node in self.event_stream:
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/dom/pulldom.py", line 232, in next
    rc = self.getEvent()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/dom/pulldom.py", line 265, in getEvent
    self.parser.feed(buf)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/sax/expatreader.py", line 210, in feed
    self._parser.Parse(data, isFinal)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xc5' in position 565: ordinal not in range(128)

fixturestr is a unicode object. Eliminating non-ascii characters is not an option. How can I stop the deserializer from doing this?

Answer 1

Try to convert your unicode object to string using smart_str:

from django.utils.encoding import smart_str
from django.core import serializers

objects = serializers.deserialize('xml', smart_str(fixturestr))
o = next(objects)