PIP Install Numpy throws an error "ascii codec can't decode byte 0xe2"

Question

I have a freshly installed Ubuntu on a freshly built computer. I just installed python-pip using apt-get. Now when I try to pip install Numpy and Pandas, it gives the following error.

I've seen this error mentioned in quite a few places on SO and Google, but I haven't been able to find a solution. Some people mention it's a bug, some threads are just dead... What's going on?

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/pip", line 9, in <module> load_entry_point('pip==1.5.4', 'console_scripts', 'pip')() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/__init__.py", line 185, in main return command.main(cmd_args) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/basecommand.py", line 161, in main text = '\n'.join(complete_log) UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 72: ordinal not in range(128)

Are there non-ASCII characters in your hostname, home directory, &c.? Does setting LC_ALL=C make any difference? — Charles Duffy
– Charles Duffy, Commented Oct 20, 2014 at 20:15
While this post is aimed at Amazon's EC2, it seems to be the same problem, and I find the answers more helpful: stackoverflow.com/questions/19595944/… — BenjaminGolder
– BenjaminGolder, Commented Dec 4, 2014 at 12:07
I still do have a problem with the installation even though i have gotten numpy. Is there anyone else that have this problem? — eleijonmarck
– eleijonmarck, Commented Mar 19, 2015 at 21:45
As OP, and 3 years later, I can say I have solved this by migrating to Haskell ;) — Josh.F
– Josh.F, Commented Aug 7, 2017 at 22:50

Jeff M. · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-20 20:11:22Z

45

I had this exact problem recently and used

apt-get install python-numpy

This adds numpy to your system python interpreter. I may have had to do the same for matplotlib. To use in a virtualenv, you have to create your environment using the

--system-site-packages

option

http://www.scipy.org/install.html

answered Oct 20, 2014 at 20:11

Jeff M.

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6 Comments

Josh.F Over a year ago

Thanks! Also, I found that if python-dev doesn't come stock on the computer, you need that too

Jeff M. Over a year ago

Yeah. I remember that now.. Good catch.

fiatjaf Over a year ago

You don't need to recreate your virtualenv, you can modify an existing one with virtualenv VIRTUALENV_DIR --system-site-packages.

baltasvejas Over a year ago

Had same issue on Ubuntu server 14.02. sudo apt-get install python2.7-dev solved the issue.

Mark Over a year ago

This solves the problem but I think you should at least mention you are making (all) system packages available, so the point of using virtualenv is partially defeated...

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msemelman · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-05 13:02:57Z

37

For me @Charles Duffy comment solved it. Put this in your env:

LC_ALL=C

You can add it to your .bashrc with a line like this:

export LC_ALL=C

But take in care that you'll affect all other programs. So you may want to use it just for the pip run:

$ LC_ALL=C pip install ...

edited Jun 5, 2017 at 13:02

answered Jul 22, 2015 at 20:16

msemelman

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6 Comments

moi Over a year ago

This seems to be the correct answer. Using --system-site-packages was not an option for me.

Gil Hiram Over a year ago

a better wording for you answer would be: add "export LC_ALL=C" to your ~/.bashrc

msemelman Over a year ago

@GilHiram Depends on your shell type you may have to set up this env variable in other places. unix.stackexchange.com/questions/50665/…

Arjun Over a year ago

The install didn't work for me both within, and outside a virtualenv so using --system-site-packages was not the right answer. I got it to work inside a virtualenv with LC_ALL=C pip install ....

radtek Over a year ago

@javadba It forces applications to use the default language for output, and forces sorting to be bytewise.

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Noah · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-23 17:40:37Z

13

Try updating pip:

pip install -U pip

answered Jul 23, 2016 at 17:40

Noah

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1 Comment

kalebo Over a year ago

This worked for me on debian jessie inside of a venv.

max · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-12 19:14:25Z

I had that problem with matplotlib package. I had to execute:

export LC_ALL=C pip install --upgrade setuptools

jvd10 · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-01 19:18:08Z

For me this was solved by ignoring a (presumably) corrupted cache with

pip install --no-cache-dir ...

as described here: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/2674

Kamil Budziewski · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-21 07:00:30Z

3

A combination of

sudo apt-get install python-dev

and

export LC_ALL=C pip install --upgrade setuptools

solved my problem.

edited Oct 21, 2015 at 7:00

Kamil Budziewski

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answered Oct 21, 2015 at 6:36

Ali

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Comments

Selah · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-22 19:19:13Z

3

I had a similar error when running pip install pandas and it was due to a memory shortage. I increased the memory in my virtual machine to 4G and that fixed things.

edited Mar 22, 2017 at 19:19

answered Dec 15, 2014 at 22:03

Selah

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1 Comment

tourdownunder Over a year ago

Same here. Upgraded VM instance from 1 to a 2 gig RAM temporarily while installing.

harshhx17 · Accepted Answer · 2018-05-23 18:33:02Z

Recently, I stumbled upon the same problem This solved it for me:

 echo 'export LANG=en_US.UTF-8' >> ~/.bashrc echo 'export LANGUAGE=en_US:en' >> ~/.bashrc echo 'export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8' >> ~/.bashrc sudo apt-get install language-pack-en

Note,

I already had python-numpy and python-dev installed. Even this may be causing a problem on your system. You can also export LC_ALL=C instead of en_US.UTF-8(or any other language)

Jan DB · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-01 08:44:51Z

When running in a docker container, this fixed it for me (on the project django-postgrespool, but this should also work here).

# Set the locale RUN sed -i -e 's/# en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8/' /etc/locale.gen && \ locale-gen ENV LANG en_US.UTF-8 ENV LANGUAGE en_US:en ENV LC_ALL en_US.UTF-8

see https://stackoverflow.com/a/28406007/1876203

locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 worked for me as well! Or RUN locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 in Dockerfile

Toby Seo · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-20 08:46:12Z

1

In 'site-packages' directory, make 'sitecustomize.py' like this

import sys sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

Now you can get the file 'pip.log'

answered Nov 20, 2014 at 8:46

Toby Seo

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1 Comment

user1158559 Over a year ago

This is only an indirect answer, but it teaches something and does not deserve to be downvoted.

Tavleen · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-16 08:09:17Z

try sudo apt-get install python-numpy . It worked out for me and same can be used for scipy,pandas etc by replacing them in place of numpy. (Y)

Nikhil · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-12 04:05:45Z

@OSX Users: Add the following lines to your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc

LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"

Execute the scripts using source ~/.profile or source ~/.bashrc

arinarmo · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-04 01:21:06Z

If you want the pip version of numpy, you can build the dependencies for the package and then install it using pip

sudo apt-get build-dep python-numpy pip install numpy

This should install everything needed at system level to install the package.

rafaelvalle · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-05 00:11:47Z

Had a similar problem on a Jetson TK1 with Ubuntu.

Works fine with apt-get install python-pandas

jlh · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-07 21:24:37Z

So many answers and none worked for me even though some clearly worked for other people. But I then figured out what my problem was, so I'll just add it to the collection:

dpkg-reconfigure locales # enable the "en-US.UTF-8" locale # when asked for a default, no need to define one

The thing is, I was working inside a Debian Stretch linux container that happened to not have any UTF-8 locales installed, probably because I downloaded a minimal stock image. With this UTF-8 locale now installed, pip properly installed numpy and other packages.

Pete · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-11 20:55:48Z

In my case I had just installed Python from source (on a remote machine where I am not sudo). For whatever reason, pip was on some really old version. So after:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

I was able to install numpy and everything I wanted without trouble.

Eleven · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-22 20:22:50Z

I met the similar problem. I tried:

export LC_ALL=C pip install --upgrade setuptools

But it did not solve the problem, but another error came up:

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'rollback'

Then I tried:

pip install -U pip

Then the problem was solved.

Amitabh Ghuwalewala · Accepted Answer · 2018-05-23 09:47:57Z

Resetting my regional settings in my machine to the expected one solved my problem. For me the problem started when I switched my language settings to English(India). I had to switch it back to English(Great Britain).

L Tyrone · Accepted Answer · 2024-04-07 06:24:49Z

I got the same error:

ascii codec can't decode byte 0xe2

because I entered the .env file variable like:

OPENAI_KEY = ``

I used backticks instead of double-quotes:

OPENAI_KEY = ""

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