encoding error reading back dataframe i just saved

When I try to read back a file saved using geopandas I get an encoding error. It works if I specify encoding=utf8 on save. However it would make more sense to fail on save. Otherwise you save some data and lose access because you cannot read it back.

gdf.to_file("popshapes.geojson", driver="GeoJSON")
gpd.read_file("popshapes.geojson")

[sgillies]

@simonm3 @martinfleis I’ve found the problem and am looking for it to be solved in GDAL/OGR: https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/2151. The way this affects fiona and GeoPandas is that this line https://github.com/Toblerity/Fiona/blob/maint-1.8/fiona/ogrext.pyx#L566 evaluates to False and so we fall back to the default encoding on your computer, which is presumably latin-1 or windows-1252.

It might be determined that fiona is misusing the OGR API, in which case we’ll need to make a special case for GeoJSON in that function.

Meanwhile, the workaround is to make sure that your environment’s default encoding is UTF-8 when you run your program.

[martinfleis]

This was most likely fixed in https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/2152. We can reopen if not.