[python] UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd1 in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)

My computer had the wrong locale set.

I first did

>>> import locale
>>> locale.getpreferredencoding(False)
'ANSI_X3.4-1968'

locale.getpreferredencoding(False) is the function called by open() when you don't provide an encoding. The output should be 'UTF-8', but in this case it's some variant of ASCII.

Then I ran the bash command locale and got this output

$ locale
LANG=
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=

So, I was using the default Ubuntu locale, which causes Python to open files as ASCII instead of UTF-8. I had to set my locale to en_US.UTF-8

sudo apt install locales 
sudo locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8    
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

If you can't change the locale system wide, you can invoke all your Python code like this:

PYTHONIOENCODING="UTF-8" python3 ./path/to/your/script.py

or do

export PYTHONIOENCODING="UTF-8"

to set it in the shell you run that in.

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