import matplotlib causes UnicodeDecodeError

[benjamindeleener]

OS: Debian (neurodebian virtual machine: http://neuro.debian.net/vm.html)
Matplotlib version: 1.5.1, installed with miniconda on python 2.7.11

I created a python environment with matplotlib installed (and a bunch of other stuff). Unfortunately, when trying to import matplotlib, I get the following error:

(/home/brain/sct_3.0_beta8/python)brain@neurodebian:~$ python
Python 2.7.11 |Continuum Analytics, Inc.| (default, Dec  6 2015, 18:08:32) 
[GCC 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-1)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
Anaconda is brought to you by Continuum Analytics.
Please check out: http://continuum.io/thanks and https://anaconda.org
>>> import matplotlib
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xb1 in position 35: invalid start byte

Any idea where this issue come from and how to fix it?
Thanks!

Original issue: spinalcordtoolbox/spinalcordtoolbox#862

[tacaswell]

Do you have non-ascii characters in your user path?

Does this happen with python3?

[tacaswell]

For reference

In [18]: chr(0xb1)
Out[18]: '±'

What is in your .matlplotlibrc file?

[benjamindeleener]

I didn't try on Python 3 (I'll try soon) and I don't think I have non-ascii characters in my user path.
When I type chr(0xb1), I get the following result:

>>> chr(0xb1)
'\xb1'

And actually, it does not look that I have a .matplotlibrc file... (I looked in .config/matplotlib/)

And it seems matplotlib was not correctly installed. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it and now it works.
That's weird.

[tacaswell]

The output of chr is a python 2/3 difference. It looks like 3 correctly handles high-code points where as 2 falls back to str(int()) just displaying the hex for the byte value

[efiring]

I gather the problem has been solved. If not, feel free to reopen this.