When writing python unit tests it might be useful to synthesize the exceptions UnicodeEncodeError and UnicodeDecodeError.

Although those exceptions are special functions and take a few special arguments that are not found easily in the python documentation (other than C-API documentation)

Handy documentation for UnicodeEncodeError

arguments:

• encoding name (bytestring, i.e b"utf-8") can be anything.
• subject object (bytestring, i.eb"") it can actually be blank, makes no difference
• start of the byte (int) the index with the position of the beginning of the supposedly unrecocnized byte
• end of the byte (int) the index with the position of the end of the supposedly unrecocnized byte
• exception message (bytestring. i.e: "oops it's buggy") can be anything

example usage:

UnicodeDecodeError('hitchhiker', b"", 42, 43, 'the universe and everything else')

Handy documentation for UnicodeEncodeError

Very similar to the UnicodeDecodeError but the subject object must
be an unicode object

arguments:

• encoding name (bytestring, i.e b"utf-8") can be anything.
• subject object (unicode string, i.eb"") it can actually be blank, makes no difference
• start of the byte (int) the index with the position of the beginning of the supposedly unrecocnized byte
• end of the byte (int) the index with the position of the end of the supposedly unrecocnized byte
• exception message (bytestring. i.e: "oops it's buggy") can be anything

example usage:

UnicodeEncodeError('hitchhiker', u"", 42, 43, 'the universe and everything else')