Fix UnicodeDecodeError during installation

[elvisyjlin]

I encountered the following error when installing gallery-dl using Python 3.5.2 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Installation command

python3 setup.py install

Encountered error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 21, in <module>
    exec(read("gallery_dl/version.py"))
  File "setup.py", line 17, in read
    return open(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), fname)).read()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
    return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 53: ordinal not in range(128)

In the file gallery_dl/version.py, there is a non-ascii character in name Mike Fährmann.
So setup.py failed to read the version with default encoding ascii and raised the exception.

Original read() in setup.py

def read(fname):
    return open(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), fname)).read()

I revised read() into

def read(fname):
    import codecs
    return codecs.open(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), fname), 'r', 'utf-8').read()

And gallery-dl was installed successfully.

[mikf]

Thanks for your contribution.

I think it would be better to just use the encoding keyword argument for open() instead of importing the codecs module. So something like this:

return open(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), fname), encoding="utf-8").read()

(also use double quotes " if possible)

It's weird that your Python is using ASCII as default encoding. It should be UTF-8 (or the selected codepage on Windows).

[iamleot]

Hello Mike and Elvis, Mike Fährmann writes:

[...] It's weird that your Python is using ASCII as default encoding. It should be UTF-8 (or the selected codepage on Windows). [...]

No idea on Windows but on Unix-like systems it is extracted via the LC_CTYPE environment variable, so this depends on locale(1).

[elvisyjlin]

Hi Mike,
You're right. Adding the keyword encoding works for me. I'm just used to using codecs to deal with encoding problems. Thank you!

Thanks iamleot for your information about the environment variable LC_CTYPE.