Unicode
Jinja2 is using Unicode internally which means that you have to pass Unicode objects to the render function or bytestrings that only consist of ASCII characters. Additionally newlines are normalized to one end of line sequence which is per default UNIX style (\n).Python 2.x supports two ways of representing string objects. One is the str type and the other is the unicode type, both of which extend a type called basestring. Unfortunately the default is str which should not be used to store text based information unless only ASCII characters are used. With Python 2.6 it is possible to make unicode the default on a per module level and with Python 3 it will be the default.
To explicitly use a Unicode string you have to prefix the string literal with a u: u'Hänsel und Gretel sagen Hallo'. That way Python will store the string as Unicode by decoding the string with the character encoding from the current Python module. If no encoding is specified this defaults to ‘ASCII’ which means that you can’t use any non ASCII identifier.
To set a better module encoding add the following comment to the first or second line of the Python module using the Unicode literal:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
