Help please on basic python web server

Question

I been stuck on this problem for hours and I simply cannot get it to work. I am trying to run this python code to display the contents of HelloWorld.html on my localhost browser. 
The line 

f = open(filename[1:])
is getting me the error: 
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xf7 in position 1: invalid start byte

#import socket module

from socket import *

import sys # In order to terminate the program

serverSocket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)

#Prepare a sever socket

# Binding our socket to the port
serverSocket.bind(('', 80))
serverSocket.listen(1)

while True:
    # establish the connection
    print('Ready to serve...')
    connectionSocket,addr = serverSocket.accept()
    try:
        message = connectionSocket.recv(1024)
        filename = message.split()[1]
        f = open(filename[1:])
        outputdata =f.read()
        #Send one HTTP header line into socket
        connectionSocket.send(b'HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n\r\n')
        #Send the content of the request file to the client
        for i in range(0, len(outputdata)):
            connectionSocket.send(outputdata[i].encode())
        connectionSocket.send(b"\r\n".encode)

        connectionSocket.close()
    except IOError:
    #Send response message for file not found
        connectionSocket.send(b'404 file Not Found')
    #Close client socket
    connectionSocket.close()

serverSocket.close()
sys.exit() #Terminating program after sending corresponding data

Answer 1

Hi, @There,

The error is because there is some non-Ascii character in the dictionary and it can't be encoded/decoded. One simple way to avoid this error is to encode such strings with encode() function as follows (if a is the string with non-Ascii character):

a.encode('utf-8').strip()