Possible locale issue: jc -a and jc -v don't work when LANG=C on Debian Buster

I’ve installed the latest version of jc using the deb on Debian Buster using this Ansible role:

which jc
/usr/local/bin/jc

dpkg -L jc
/.
/usr
/usr/local
/usr/local/bin
/usr/local/bin/jc
/usr/share
/usr/share/man
/usr/share/man/man1
/usr/share/man/man1/jc.1
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/jc
/usr/share/doc/jc/changelog.gz

zgrep jc /usr/share/doc/jc/changelog.gz
jc (1.18.6-1) whatever; urgency=medium

And things like jc ls work without an issue, but jc -a doesn’t when LANG=C:

export LANG=C && jc -a
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "jc.cli", line 417, in main
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xa9' in position 366: ordinal not in range(128)

Nor does jc -v:

export LANG=C && jc -v 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "jc.cli", line 429, in main
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xa9' in position 55: ordinal not in range(128)

With LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 there isn’t a problem:

export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 && jc -v
jc version 1.18.6
https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc
© 2019-2022 Kelly Brazil

This isn’t the behaviour expected based on the documentation, could it be something odd with my setup? I have tested this locally and on a remove development server both as a regular user and as root and the results are consistent.

[kellyjonbrazil]

cool, making some final touches and will release as v1.18.8 in the next day or so.

[kellyjonbrazil]

Think I have this working in master now. The best way to test would be to clone the master branch and pip install from there. The behavior is pretty inconsistent, at least in my testing. Sometimes I can get the copyright character to generate the exception, and other times (say when inserting the copyright character into a k/v or csv parser input) no exception is generated and the character prints just fine with C locale. Strange.