Got error while encoding text in linux

Question

I am using python code to encode text before inserting into a database in a remote server (linux). Since I have special characters so I need to encode them to unicode. But I got following error while encoding text.

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xf8 in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)

my code is:

        for item in dict.iteritems():
             name = item[0].encode('UTF-8') --  error in this line
            ..........

What does this mean? Why this works in WIndows7 and not in Linux ? I am very new to linux, so did not understand the way it worked differently in windows7 and linux.

Answer 1

It means that the key is already encoded, and the system is attempting to decode it first before the encode operation.