Python 2.7 UnicodeDecodeError upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Summary
Use
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')
Longer explanation (or at least more text)
A python script stopped working when upgrading from Ubuntu 17.10 to 18.04LTS. It was still running under python 2.7 but it now had the dreaded UnicodeDecodeError. Why?
Well, who knows, but a possibilty is that Ubuntu has stopped setting a default encoding. The solution is as above.
from __future__ import unicode_literals
…did not work since that made things such as
d.isoformat(' ')
stop working complaining about there being unicode.