Invalid byte sequence error during rake generate

[bbatsov]

I've recently converted my Jekyll blog to Octopress. The process was quite smooth, but then I ran into a very strange problem. When I run rake generate on my home mac - everything works fine. When I run it on my work macbook, however, I get this error:

➜  bbatsov.github.com git:(source) ✗ bundle exec rake generate
## Generating Site with Jekyll
unchanged sass/screen.scss
Configuration from /Users/bozhidar/projects/bbatsov.github.com/_config.yml
Building site: source -> public
/Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/jekyll-0.11.0/lib/jekyll/convertible.rb:29:in `read_yaml': invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII (ArgumentError)
    from /Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/jekyll-0.11.0/lib/jekyll/post.rb:39:in `initialize'
    from /Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/jekyll-0.11.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:163:in `new'
    from /Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/jekyll-0.11.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:163:in `block in read_posts'
    from /Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/jekyll-0.11.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:161:in `each'
    from /Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/jekyll-0.11.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:161:in `read_posts'
    from /Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/jekyll-0.11.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:128:in `read_directories'
    from /Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/jekyll-0.11.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:98:in `read'
    from /Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/jekyll-0.11.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:38:in `process'
    from /Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/jekyll-0.11.0/bin/jekyll:250:in `<top (required)>'
    from /Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/bin/jekyll:19:in `load'
    from /Users/bozhidar/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/bin/jekyll:19:in `<main>'

I've googled a bit and saw that others have experienced the problem as well, but I didn't find a clear solution to the problem. I'm pretty sure that the YAML front matter of my posts is OK - nothing but English in it. And what's most puzzling is that on my two macs my setup is exactly the same (or at least it seems the same to me). Any ideas how should I proceed?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[fhemberger]

Just set your locale in your ~/.profile and make sure it's set to UTF-8, e.g.:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

[bbatsov]

That did it. Thanks!

[franklouwers]

have the exact same issue at the moment, but setting the LANG and LC variables doesn't seem to help:

/Users/frank/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p0/gems/jekyll-0.11.0/lib/jekyll/convertible.rb:29:in `read_yaml': invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 (ArgumentError)

[bbonamin]

Having the exact same issue, the ~/.profile trick does not work either.

[nvd]

In my case, setting the LC_CTYPE exclusively, worked:

LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

*not sure why LC_ALL override doesn't work

[larryzhao]

Having the same issue now. Tried setting the 3 variables, but none of them worked.

[bbonamin]

Check if your text files have non-recognized characters, that fixed it for
me.

2012/8/31 Larry Zhao notifications@github.com

Having the same issue now. Tried setting the 3 variables, but none of them
worked.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/267#issuecomment-8194883.

[larryzhao]

@bbonamin Yes, I went down that road yesterday after post that comment and finally found the cause. Thanks. :)