Using Django, and easy_thumbnails coupled with Pillow specifically I’m stumbled upon this error in PIL.ImageFile on PIL/_binary.py:

ord() expected a character, but string of length 0 found

This python error was so frequent I’ve done some research, coming up with nothing.

I’ve checked current Pillow version with:

pip freeze | grep Pillow

Getting:

Pillow==3.0.0

Then I’ve upgraded the Pillow package with this:

pip install Pillow --upgrade

The sofware was updated to the very last version (5.0.0) without any issue on easy_thumbnails backend or frontend.

Consequently, pip freeze returned:

Pillow==5.0.0

and errors are gone.

tl;dr: Update Pillow from 3.0.0 to latest version (5.0.0 by now)

Note: this error can be accompained by others:

• unpack requires a string argument of length 2
• string index out of range

Upgrading Pillow also correct these.