Windows10 - UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

Followed steps to install mqttwarn on my W10 machine. Everything seemed to work including mqttwarn make-xxx commands. Finally tried running mqttwarn by itself and got strange error messages. Any help?

pip install --upgrade mqttwarn
mqttwarn make-config > mqttwarn.ini
cat mqttwarn.ini
mqttwarn make-samplefuncs > samplefuncs.py

mqttwarn
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\Program Files (D)\Python37\Scripts\mqttwarn-script.py", line 33, in <module>
    sys.exit(load_entry_point('mqttwarn==0.28.1', 'console_scripts', 'mqttwarn')())
  File "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\site-packages\mqttwarn\commands.py", line 93, in run
    run_mqttwarn()
  File "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\site-packages\mqttwarn\commands.py", line 132, in run_mqttwarn
    config = load_configuration(name=scriptname)
  File "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\site-packages\mqttwarn\configuration.py", line 196, in load_configuration
    return Config(configfile, defaults=defaults)
  File "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\site-packages\mqttwarn\configuration.py", line 38, in __init__
    self.read_file(f)
  File "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\configparser.py", line 717, in read_file
    self._read(f, source)
  File "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\configparser.py", line 1014, in _read
    for lineno, line in enumerate(fp, start=1):
  File "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\codecs.py", line 714, in __next__
    return next(self.reader)
  File "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\codecs.py", line 645, in __next__
    line = self.readline()
  File "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\codecs.py", line 558, in readline
    data = self.read(readsize, firstline=True)
  File "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\codecs.py", line 504, in read
    newchars, decodedbytes = self.decode(data, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

[symonjim]

I did that with the .py files. I opened them in notepad and immediately did a “save as” choosing utf8 and overwriting the original. Interestingly all the files I had worked with had said they were going to save as utf8 until I got to samplefuncs.py which said it would save as utf16. I changed that to utf8 and…presto! It works!

PS D:\Program Files (D)\mqttwarn-main\mqttwarn-main> mqttwarn
2022-08-17 18:28:26,596 INFO     [mqttwarn.commands         ] Starting mqttwarn
2022-08-17 18:28:26,597 INFO     [mqttwarn.commands         ] Log level is DEBUG
2022-08-17 18:28:26,597 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Trying to load built-in service "file" from "file"
2022-08-17 18:28:26,598 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Trying to load service "file" from file "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\site-packages\mqttwarn\services\file.py"
2022-08-17 18:28:26,599 INFO     [mqttwarn.core             ] Successfully loaded service "file"
2022-08-17 18:28:26,599 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Trying to load built-in service "log" from "log"
2022-08-17 18:28:26,600 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Trying to load service "log" from file "d:\program files (d)\python37\lib\site-packages\mqttwarn\services\log.py"
2022-08-17 18:28:26,601 INFO     [mqttwarn.core             ] Successfully loaded service "log"
2022-08-17 18:28:26,601 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Attempting connection to MQTT broker localhost:1883...
2022-08-17 18:28:26,601 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Setting LWT to clients/mqttwarn...
2022-08-17 18:28:28,672 INFO     [mqttwarn.core             ] Publishing status information to mqttwarn/$SYS
2022-08-17 18:28:28,673 INFO     [mqttwarn.core             ] Starting 1 worker threads
2022-08-17 18:28:28,678 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Job queue has 0 items to process
2022-08-17 18:28:28,679 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Connected to MQTT broker, subscribing to topics...
2022-08-17 18:28:28,680 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Cleansession==False; previous subscriptions for clientid mqttwarn remain active on broker
2022-08-17 18:28:28,682 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Subscribing to hello/1 (qos=0)
2022-08-17 18:28:28,682 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Subscribing to owntracks/+/+ (qos=0)
2022-08-17 18:28:28,683 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Subscribing to test/robustness-1 (qos=0)
2022-08-17 18:28:28,683 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Subscribing to test/topic-targets-dynamic (qos=0)
2022-08-17 18:28:28,684 DEBUG    [mqttwarn.core             ] Subscribing to test/topic-targets-func (qos=0)

and mosquitto seemed to react. Now I just need to make some adjustments for my setup and tell it what to do when it gets a message.

Thanks for all your help.

Jim

[amotl]

7b42d6c improves the README correspondingly, so let me close this issue. Thanks again for making us aware of it, Jim.