Legacy 3.6 branch UnicodeDecodeError during installation

[Steven Braun]

When running python setup.py install on the legacy_3.6 branch, I'm getting:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/tmp/pip-install-pv1d_p_r/e2cnn/setup.py", line 19, in <module>
    long_description = f.read()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
    return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 6561: ordinal not in range(128)

If I hotfix this by setting long_description = "", the installation works.

(Python 3.6.9)

[Gabriele Cesa]

Hi @Steven-LANG

Unfortunately, I am not able to reproduce this issue..

I am trying to install the legacy version with

pip install git+https://github.com/QUVA-Lab/e2cnn@legacy_py3.6

and I am using pip 20.2.2.

I guess the problem is that long_description contains the source of the file README.md, which might have some special characters.

I found a similar problem (and a possible solution) here: https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/pull/834/files
They just explicitly add encoding='utf-8' when loading the README file.

However, since I can not reproduce this issue on my machines, I also can not check if this solves the problem.
Would you mind trying it on you machine?

Please, let me know if this solves your problem :)

Gabriele

[Steven Braun]

Sorry, I should have posted the complete environment that I was testing it in. I tried to reproduce it on different machines now with no success.

I was using the nvidia docker cuda-10.1-cudnn7-devel image (ubuntu 18.04 as base) from which the above-mentioned error occurred.

Setting encoding='utf-8' in fact solves the issue.

I'm not sure why this specific setup causes the issue in the first place but it might be a good idea to set it to utf-8 as default for compatibility reasons.