# UnicodeEncodeError?

**URL:** <https://discourse.psychopy.org/t/unicodeencodeerror/3131>\
**Category:** Builder\
**Created:** [September 28, 2017, 3:13am UTC](https://discourse.psychopy.org/t/unicodeencodeerror/3131 "2017-09-28T03:13:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![wilsodj](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e9c0ed/32.png) [@wilsodj](https://discourse.psychopy.org/u/wilsodj)\
**Post date:** [September 28, 2017, 3:13am UTC](https://discourse.psychopy.org/t/unicodeencodeerror/3131/1 "2017-09-28T03:13:16Z")

</div>

If this template helps then use it. If not then just delete and start from scratch.

**OS** (e.g. Win10): Mac 10.12.4  
**PsychoPy version** (e.g. 1.84.x): 1.85.4  
**Standard Standalone? (y/n)** If not then what?: y  
**What are you trying to achieve?:** Just trying to run an experiment that had been working fine previously and suddenly stopped working.

Restarted and also tried making a new simple project and got the same error.

This is the error message.

````auto
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/djw/Desktop/testsdf", line 14, in <module>
    from psychopy import locale_setup, sound, gui, visual, core, data, event, logging
  File "/Applications/PsychoPy2.app/Contents/Resources/lib/python2.7/psychopy/sound/ __init__.py", line 140, in <module>
    elif dev not in backend.getDevices(kind='output'):
  File "/Applications/PsychoPy2.app/Contents/Resources/lib/python2.7/psychopy/sound/backend_pyo.py", line 68, in getDevices
    devName = dev['name'].decode(osEncoding) # convert to unicode
  File "encodings/utf_8.pyc", line 16, in decode
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019' in position 15: ordinal not in range(128)```
````