Crontab has unicode error when sending tweet

Question

I am currently running a python script to detect changes in a website's json object that consists of products.

When i run it manually on my ubuntu server it works fine (sends tweet) but when it is run with the crontab, it gives me this error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)

Here is the code. Basically I am comparing different versions of the json file to see if there's a difference. If there's a difference, send a tweet.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import twitter
import requests
from jsondiff import diff
from classes.logger import Logger
from classes.proxies import Proxy
import webbrowser
import time
import json

log = Logger().log

class Cactus:
    proxy = Proxy()
    def __init__(self):
        self.url = 'http://api.bigcartel.com/cactusplantfleamarket/products.json'
        self.front = 'http://www.cactusplantfleamarket.bigcartel.com'
        self.api = twitter.Api(consumer_key='xxx',
                  consumer_secret='xxx',
                  access_token_key='xxx',
                  access_token_secret='xxx')

def scrape(self):

    with open('cactus.txt') as oldjson:
        old = json.load(oldjson);


    current_proxy = self.proxy.getProxy()[self.proxy.countProxy()]
    session = requests.session()
    resp = session.get(self.url, proxies=current_proxy).json()

    with open('cactus.txt', 'w') as outfile:
        json.dump(resp, outfile)

    if diff(resp, old) != {}:

        if len(resp) == 0:
            curr_time = time.strftime("%d %b %H:%M:%S", time.gmtime())
            self.api.PostUpdate('Website Updated at ' + curr_time )
        else:
            for item in range(len(resp)):
                try:
                    self.tweet(resp[item])
                except Exception as e:
                    print(e)


    def tweet(self, item):
        print(item['name'])
        curr_time = time.strftime("%d %b %H:%M:%S", time.gmtime())
        url = self.front + item['url']
        shorturl = self.goo_shorten_url(url)['id']
        self.api.PostUpdate('CPFM: ' + item['name'] + ' - ' + curr_time + ' ' + shorturl)

    def goo_shorten_url(self, url):
        API_KEY = 'xxxx'
        post_url = 'https://www.googleapis.com/urlshortener/v1/url?key={}'.format(API_KEY)
        payload = {'longUrl': url}
        headers = {'content-type': 'application/json'}
        r = requests.post(post_url, data=json.dumps(payload), headers=headers)
        return r.json()

Answer 1

We did some sleuthing in chat and figured out that the script was accidentally being run with Python 2 instead of Python 3 (the clue was the u prefix on u'\xa0').