Does this still work without unicode_literals? $ python >>> "{}".format(u'ł') Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u0142' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128) $ python >>> from __future__ import unicode_literals >>> "{}".format(u'ł') u'\u0142' I think it will crash without that. On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 11:14 PM, Roderick Smith