Traceback when locale not set to UTF-8

On a machine where the locale has not been set to UTF-8 you get tracebacks when installing/running pipx. E.g. when installing:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "get-pipx.py.1", line 287, in <module>
    main()
  File "get-pipx.py.1", line 283, in main
    print(f"Enjoy! {'\u2728 \U0001f31f \u2728' if not WINDOWS else ''}")
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u2728' in position 7: ordinal not in range(256)

Or when installing a package:

ipx install poetry
zsh: correct 'pipx' to 'popd' [nyae]? n
2nstalling package 'poetry'       
  installed package poetry 0.12.11, Python 3.6.7
  These binaries are now globally available
    - poetry
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/pmav2/.local/bin/pipx", line 10, in <module>
    sys.exit(cli())
  File "/home/pmav2/.local/pipx/venvs/pipx-app/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pipx/main.py", line 932, in cli
    run_pipx_command(args)
  File "/home/pmav2/.local/pipx/venvs/pipx-app/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pipx/main.py", line 642, in run_pipx_command
    force=args.force,
  File "/home/pmav2/.local/pipx/venvs/pipx-app/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pipx/main.py", line 505, in install
    print(f"done! {stars}")
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u2728' in position 6: ordinal not in range(256)

Obviously, the problem is the special characters in the print statements. My guess is that you could check sys.getdefaultencoding() before you actually try to print them.

If you want to test this, on ubuntu you can set an “ansi” encoding with:

sudo update-locale LANG=en_US

and restore utf-8 with:

sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

You probably need to open a new terminal after each change though.

[jsoutherland]

It looks like it’s possible to avoid these issues by disabling emojis like this:

USE_EMOJI=false python3 -m pipx ensurepath

[uranusjr]

I filed #619 to mention a pip upgrade may be required to install pipx.