`pip install pandas` gives UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 41: ordinal not in range(128)

Question

When performing pip install pandas on a Digital Ocean 512MB droplet, I get the error UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 41: ordinal not in range(128).

Any ideas what may have caused it? I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 64bit.

[Full Error]

How much RAM do you have on your VPS? GCC is being killed by the OS, which probably means that you ran out of RAM while compiling. Either add a swap partition or just install Pandas via apt-get: `sudo apt-get install python-pandas`. — Blender, Dec 12 '13 at 22:46
Yeah, stuff like this has happened in similar situations to [other people](https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/1880). — DSM, Dec 12 '13 at 22:49

score 12 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:30

12

It looks like gcc being killed due to insufficient memory (see @Blender's comment) exposed a bug in pip. It mixes bytestrings and Unicode while logging that leads to:

>>> '\n'.join(['bytestring with non-ascii character ☺', u'unicode'])
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 36: \
   ordinal not in range(128)

If it is reproducible with the latest pip version; you could report the bug.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:30

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answered Dec 13 '13 at 00:44

jfs

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and [to upgrade](http://stackoverflow.com/a/15223296/1224255), `pip install --upgrade pip` (upgrading fixed this for me) – TheGrimmScientist Oct 02 '15 at 23:06
On ubuntu I could not upgrade pip until I removed the ubuntu package using `apt-get remove python-pip` and then running the above upgrade code. – Sam May 04 '16 at 09:50

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 12 '18 at 23:33

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It might be a permissions issue. Did you try:

$ sudo pip install pandas

answered Nov 12 '18 at 23:33

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`pip install pandas` gives UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 41: ordinal not in range(128)

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