certbot renew / certonly dash error : 'ascii' codec can't decode byte

Question

I'm getting a weird error on lets-encrypt certbot that seems linked to the presence of a dash in my second domain name (on the real one position 8 correspond to the position of said dash).

The error occurs regardless of wether I try to renew or create a new certificate. The original (functionnal) certificate was generated using certbot no pb...

./certbot-auto certonly --nginx -d domain1 -d domain2
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator nginx, Installer nginx
Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing...
Renewing an existing certificate
Performing the following challenges:
tls-sni-01 challenge for domain1
tls-sni-01 challenge for domain-2
Cleaning up challenges
An unexpected error occurred:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 8: ordinal not in range(128)

What can I do from here?

Answer 1

I indeeed had a non ascii character in that file, the useful command for such problems is :

grep -nRP '[\x80-\xFF]' /etc/nginx

Where /etc/nginx is the directory/file you want to look for a non ascii character. And where [\x80-\xFF] is the range (in this case non-ascii) you want to look for.

Answer 2

Using the following command:

grep -r -P '[^\x00-\x7f]' /etc/apache2 /etc/letsencrypt /etc/nginx

Found mine in

/etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf:        # The following CSP directives don't use default-src as 

Using shed, I found the offending sequence. It turned out to be an editor mistake. 00008099: C2 194 302 11000010 00008100: A0 160 240 10100000 00008101: d 64 100 144 01100100 00008102: e 65 101 145 01100101 00008103: f 66 102 146 01100110 00008104: a 61 097 141 01100001 00008105: u 75 117 165 01110101 00008106: l 6C 108 154 01101100 00008107: t 74 116 164 01110100 00008108: - 2D 045 055 00101101 00008109: s 73 115 163 01110011 00008110: r 72 114 162 01110010 00008111: c 63 099 143 01100011 00008112: C2 194 302 11000010 00008113: A0 160 240 10100000

Using an editor (i.e. vim), I edited out the offending byte sequence.