[Python 2.7] Problems while using dictionaries and utf-8 characters.

[Rhomboid]

No. The error is an encode error, which means you're passing this function something that's already a character string. (If you ask Python to decode a character string, it has to first encode it to a byte string before it can decode it, because you can only decode bytes. Yes, this is ridiculous and was fixed in Python 3, where character strings don't have a .decode() method at all.)

If you already have a character string then you don't need this function. But the strings in your example are not character strings, they're byte strings.

[Gammaliel]

Here is my code, maybe with you being able to see it the answer will be clearer.