I have an executable Python 3.6 CGI script that is running on an Apache2 server, Ubuntu 18.04.
When the script tries to execute this line:
print("<p>Something about latitude x°</p>"),
it throws the error:
'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xb0' in position 203: ordinal not in range(128)
Even though the encoding is specified as UTF-8 in the HTML head with <meta charset="utf-8">.
When I try to force UTF-8 on the string with .encode('utf-8'), i.e.
print("<p>Something about latitude x°</p>".encode('utf-8')),
the error disappears but the degree sign shows up as UTF8 hex
Something about latitude x\xc2\xb0
I tried setting an environment variable export PYTHONIOENCODING=UTF-8 in /etc/environment and created a global variable /etc/profile.d/python-encoding.sh, then reloaded both files using source, and restarted Apache2 server systemctl restart apache2, but to no avail.
CGI version: 2.6.
Declaring the default charset and setting the environment variable for Python encoding in Apache2 .conf did the trick, as mentioned here: Python CGI - UTF-8 doesn't work
As pointed out by @furas.