Fixed #22880 -- Added FAQ entry about UnicodeDecodeError

``python C:\pythonXY\Scripts\django-admin.py``.

.. _virtualenv: http://www.virtualenv.org/

Miscellaneous

=============

I'm getting a ``UnicodeDecodeError``. What am I doing wrong?

------------------------------------------------------------

This class of errors happen when a bytestring containing non-ASCII sequences is

transformed into a Unicode string and the specified encoding is incorrect. The

output generally looks like this::

    UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x?? in position ?:

    ordinal not in range(128)

The resolution mostly depends on the context, however here are two common

pitfalls producing this error:

* Your system locale may be a default ASCII locale, like the "C" locale on

  UNIX-like systems (can be checked by the ``locale`` command). If it's the

  case, please refer to your system documentation to learn how you can change

  this to a UTF-8 locale.

* You created raw bytestrings, which is easy to do on Python 2::

      my_string = 'café'

  Either use the ``u''`` prefix or even better, add the

  ``from __future__ import unicode_literals`` line at the top of your file

  so that your code will be compatible with Python 3.2 which doesn't support

  the ``u''`` prefix.

Related resources:

* :doc:`Unicode in Django </ref/unicode>`

* https://wiki.python.org/moin/UnicodeDecodeError