Python dict as unicode

[Brendon]

Hi all,

I am trying to convert a dictionary to a unicode string and it fails
with an exception. I am awfully surprised but searching the web has
not turned up anything useful. I understand why the exception ocurrs,
but am not sure why this is the default behaviour of python and if
there is anything I can do to fix the problem.

I have a python dictionary:
d = { ......}

It contains both primitive and complex objects. I want a unicode
representation of that dict:
s = unicode(d)

Doing this I get an exception:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position
71: ordinal not in range(128)

Now, it seems that unicode(d) is the same as unicode(str(d)). I was
expecting there to be a __unicode__ method in the dictionary that in
turn calls unicode() on each of the keys/values in the dict, but
apparently not. Instead it seems to call the equivalent of str() on
each key/value and then after adding them together, calls unicode() on
the resulting string.

Is this really the default behaviour? If so is there any way around
it?

I am using python 2.6.6 on a Linux system.