"UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte"

[ivankravets]

Problem occurs under Windows OS and for environment where configurable encoding is used (non UTF-8 paths).

https://docs.python.org/2/howto/unicode.html#unicode-filenames

import sys
sys.getdefaultencoding()

Try this hook for platformio.util.get_home_dir:

def get_home_dir():
    home_dir = _get_projconf_option_dir(
        "home_dir",
        join(expanduser("~"), ".platformio")
    )

    import sys
    home_dir = home_dir.decode(sys.getfilesystemencoding())

    if not isdir(home_dir):
        os.makedirs(home_dir)

    assert isdir(home_dir)
    return home_dir

How to reproduce? Just create account with "non-UTF-8" chars (Cyrillic is good candidate).

[ivankravets]

We can fix this issue within PlatformIO source code, but problem still exists within SCons source code.

Solution

To avoid this issue please re-define PlatformIO home_dir in your project configuration file platformio.ini or set global PLATFORMIO_HOME_DIR system environment variable. PlatformIO uses user's home directory by default, which can contain "non-latin" characters. The easy way is to set home_dir with path, which doesn't contain "non-latin" chars:

platformio.ini

[platformio]
home_dir = C:\.platformio

[env:your_env_here]
....

NOTICE: All PlatformIO based commands should be executed within that project directory, where home_dir is defined.

[ivankravets]

Add this issue to http://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/faq.html#windows-unicodedecodeerror-ascii-codec-can-t-decode-byte

[me21]

@ivankravets This error is also triggered by storing project in path containing non-latin characters. The workaround is (obviously) to store projects elsewhere or creating symlink (directory junction) so that PlatformIO does not have to deal with non-latin paths.

PS in my case it was 'utf8' codec, not 'ascii'.

[ivankravets]

Please open PlatformIO IDE Terminal and type

pio upgrade --dev
pio update

Restart VSCode. Does it work now?