Cannot install PIL due to a UnicodeDecodeError
pip, python, python-3.3, python-imaging-library
Solution
I just ran into this issue as well. I'm not sure if it's a pip problem or a Pillow problem, but the "culprit" appears to be the name of one of the Pillow authors, which contains non-ascii characters (Håkan Karlsson). Apparently, an EGG info file is constructed from the CHANGES.rst file in Pillow, and pip tries to parse that in ascii, failing that. Changing the authors name seems like a bad idea, so pip should handle that better.
And indeed, `pip install --upgrade pip` worked for me (upgrading from pip 1.4 to 1.5). It seems this change fixed that.
Problem
When I tried to install Pillow using pip-3.3, I got an error instead, see the traceback below. ``` File "/home/samsun/workspace/python/chat_environment/lib/python3.3/site-packages/pip/req.py", line 297, in egg_info_data data = fp.read() File "/home/samsun/workspace/python/chat_environment/lib/python3.3/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 14439: ordinal not in range(128) ``` I think the traceback is telling me some characters in the file are Unicode, but Python is using ASCII to read the file. I want to change python3.3 filesystemencoding to resolve this error; is there a way to change the default filesystemencoding?