Great explanation. I had the same problem recently. But the plaintext.encode(‘rot13’) does not work with unicode characters either (at least in 2.7.3).

Wow, i have been reading code from gdata for about 1o hours thinking that was the issue, all it took was to encode parameters :P, thanks a lot man :D

Thanks, you saved me some time–was confounded by this Django error. I implemented your same “lazy half-assed” solution and it is working great in my situation!