Character encoding for synthetic Python scripts

[Jonathan.Sanders]

I have a synthetic script running on App Dynamics which asserts that the title of the page contains the non-Ascii character 'EN DASH'. The script runs fine on App Dynamics, but when I copy the script locally Python attempts to decode the character using Ascii and throws the following error:

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file my-script.py on line 24, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details

I've tried forcing Python to use UTF-8 encoding by including the following at the top of the script:

# coding=utf-8

...but I then see the following error.

File "scripts/halo-privacy-center.py", line 25, in <module>

    assert "Tesco – Privacy Centre" in driver.title

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 6: ordinal not in range(128)

Where can I find information on how the environment for Python is configured for App Dynamics so I can replicate that locally? Or in other words, how can I force Python to decode characters in the same way it does in App Dynamics?

[Abhimanyu.Arora]

Hi Jonathan,

May be you can try adding terminal encoding where you are trying to run the python script -

export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

See if this resolves the issue.

Thanks

Abhimanyu

[Jonathan.Sanders]

Unfortunately that doesn’t fix the issue.

[Abhimanyu.Arora]

Hi Jonathan,

Can you provide a sample script that would produce this error, so that I can try it on my environment and update you with a potential solution.

Thanks

Abhimanyu

[Jonathan.Sanders]

This is a simplified version of my script:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 20)
driver.get(https://www.google.com")
assert "Page title – with strange hyphen" in driver.title
driver.quit