Hi. In article <6e9196d20605101415v4a435a41r7a3e226a27b5314d@mail.gmail.com>, "Mike Orr"writes: sluggoster> I tried sys.setdefaultencoding("latin1") but that has to be done in sluggoster> the 'site' module; it's not available within a program. I'm also using Quixote-2 for my Japanese(UTF-8) application. Here is a kludge I'm using to set default encoding without modifying global site module: import sys reload(sys) sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8") It can't be appropriate, but it works perfectly for getting rid of annoying 'ascii' codec error. -- kayama