Encoding troubles

[Xaver Hinterhuber]

Hello pythonistas,

I program a class which stores the source code for an output page in a
string.
At request time it compiles it, executes it and returns the result.
I now have upgraded the class from python 2.1 to python 2.3.
So I have to do some encoding work I previously didn't have to do.
If I execute the appended code, then it raises me an error stating:

Error Type: UnicodeDecodeError
Error Value: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not
in range(128)

What is wrong?

The code is the following:

class Report:
  """This class is generating reports as pdf-files with the source code
provided in the variable content"""
  # default values for test
  content = """
Story = ['ÄÖÜäöüß?'] #german umlauts for test purposes
"""
  def compileContent(self):
    """Compiles the content of the pdf-pages"""
    content = self.content
    # Here the error occurs
    content = content.decode('iso8859-15')
    codeString = HTML(content, globals())
    codeString = codeString(self._getContext())
    codeString = codeString.replace('\r\n', '\n')
    codeString = codeString.split('\n')
    if codeString[-1].strip() == '\n':
      del codeString[-1]
    # Code als Funktion kompilieren
    codeString.append('return Story')
    codeString = '\n\t'.join(codeString)
    codeString += '\n'
    codeString = 'def f():\n\t' + codeString
    codeObject = compile(codeString, 'codeObject', 'exec')
    return codeObject

  def __call__(self):
    dict={}
    dict.update(globals())
    dict.update(locals())
    dict.update(kw)
    codeObject = self.compileContent()
    exec codeObject in dict
    Story = dict['f']() # Ausführen der Funktion
    return Story
-- 
with kind regards
Xaver Hinterhuber