Unicode characters cause dynamodb get-item to fail

[sbressler]

Reported on this resolved issue, so opening a new issue.

I'm having the same issue when querying dynamodb for an attribute of an item which has non-ASCII characters:

% aws dynamodb query --table-name <table> --select "<key>" --attributes-to-get <attribute> --debug
...
2014-07-25 13:20:37,038 - awscli.errorhandler - DEBUG - HTTP Response Code: 400
2014-07-25 13:20:37,038 - awscli.clidriver - DEBUG - Exception caught in main()
...
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2026' in position 1304: ordinal not in range(128)
2014-07-25 13:20:37,041 - awscli.clidriver - DEBUG - Exiting with rc 255

'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2026' in position 1304: ordinal not in range(128)

aws --version: aws-cli/1.3.4 Python/2.7.6 Linux/2.6.18-164.el5

I've also seen it fail on u'\xbb'. I imagine it would fail on any non-ASCII character.

[jamesls]

Can you clarify if in your command <attribute> is type on the command line or if it comes from a JSON file?

In both cases, the encoding used will be based on your LANG/LC_ALL settings. If the JSON file is encoded in utf-8, try setting LANG="en_US.UTF-8" in your shell.

If this doesn't work, can you post the output of running the locale command?

[sbressler]

<attribute> was typed on command line in the above command.
Typing locale includes what you seemed to hope for in the output already on the machine I ran aws CLI on: LANG=en_US.UTF-8

[sbressler]

Turns out my “--key” argument wasn’t following the documentation on how it was supposed to be specified. I was using:
--key "http://www.<website>.com/"
I should have been using:
--key '{"url": {"S":"http://www.<website>.com"}}'

Do you know why without the more complex syntax I got the error I did? Can the error message be improved?

[jamesls]

Which argument are you talking about? There's a --key-conditions argument, but it doesn't match the syntax you've provided.

Just want to see if I can repro the issue so I can understand why it's raising that exception.

[jamesls]

Closing due to inactivity, will reopen if more info is provided.

[sbressler]

I switched from query to get-item since I realized that was more what I wanted, so I was using the --key argument:
aws dynamodb get-item --table-name <table> --key '{"<index>": {"S":"<value>"}}' --attributes-to-get <attribute>