Degree symbol is making reader break

In the ~Parameter Information section of the attached here, the reader.py is throwing an error presumably when it encounters the degree symbol in the latitude and longitude fields.

LATI .        0° 0' 0  N                 :Latitude
LONG .        0° 0' 0  E                 :Longitude

The error message I’m getting has something to do with codecs. Is this something we can fix with the reader or it a problem that has to do with my Python installation?

[1045387215_top100ft.txt] (https://github.com/kinverarity1/lasio/files/1410966/1045387215_top100ft.txt)

[kinverarity1]

I can’t reproduce the error! Is it because I’m running windows and thus the default python encoding is correct?

The philosophy I’ve been guided by is to make it “just work” out of the box, so perhaps the default behaviour should be:

1. By default use codecs.open(encoding=None) (default system python encoding, which is itself a bit of a mystery to me)
2. If UnicodeDecodeError, catch and 2b. If cchardet (fallback chardet) installed, reload with autodetect_encoding=True 2c. If [c]chardet not installed, print warning to user recommending installation, but then try reloading with common encodings until we avoid the exception. 2c. If no success, re-raise the original UnicodeDecodeError

Does this sound like a happy medium?

[kinverarity1]

Closing until confirmation