Cannot write the dashboard: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 5-7: ordinal not in range(128)

From this comment:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 357, in render
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 5-7: ordinal not in range(128)

GDB 7.7 with Python 2.7.4 3.4.0

[cyrus-and]

I can only reproduce your issue on a machine where the locale is set to C, basically no locale, but I’m able to fix the behavior by exporting the UTF-8 variant before starting GDB, in my case:

export LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8

For example:

$ gdb -nx -ex 'python with open("/dev/null") as f: print(f.encoding)' -ex quit
ANSI_X3.4-1968
$ export LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8
$ gdb -nx -ex 'python with open("/dev/null") as f: print(f.encoding)' -ex quit
UTF-8

Can you try to run:

gdb -nx -ex 'python with open("/dev/null") as f: print(f.encoding)' -ex quit

[cyrus-and]

Good! Now, I’m not sure whether this is a thing I should fix myself or not, to my knowledge Python falls back to that encoding when it cannot figure out the proper encoding from the environment, so probably you’re experiencing this because your setup is not UTF-8-ready…

Anyway, you can use an alias, in your .bashrc or whatever so you don’t have to export it every time, plus in this way it will only affect GDB:

alias gdb='LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 gdb'

I’m closing this for now. Thanks for your patience!