> I'm trying to use Unicode in PTL templates, like this:
>
> def foo[html](self):
>     get_response().set_charset('utf8')
>     u'\N{INFINITY}'

> TypeError: encode() argument 1 must be string, not htmltext

In addition to what David has said, you've also highlighted a common trap
- if you have a callable which is expecting a str, and you are quoting a
string literal, you need to force it like so: str('utf8') otherwise ptl
will convert the str to htmltext on you.

I usually set hard coded strings like that to a constant outside the ptl
function or method to avoid litering the code with str().