Pip install raises UnicodeDecodeError on Windows. Fix?

Question

When trying to install mysql-python on my Windows 10 machine i get the following error:

  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Users\LUCAFL~1\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-build-3u7aih0l\mysql-python\setup.py", line 21, in <module>
    setuptools.setup(**metadata)
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python35-32\lib\distutils\core.py", line 148, in setup
    dist.run_commands()
  ...
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python35-32\lib\subprocess.py", line 1055, in communicate
    stdout = self.stdout.read()
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python35-32\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 23, in decode
    return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x81 in position 1716: character maps to <undefined>

I tried installing other packages and received the same error on almost every one (one exception being pymysql). All of these packages were big and had dependencies. I guess that the big ones create temporary data in my user directories APPDATA folder. As you can see, the ü is not properly decoded (ü being byte 0x81). It's always a german umlaut that produces the error (mainly ü, as it's part of my user folders name).

I googled for the last 2 hours and found a lot of people having the same problem, but mostly they were opening github tickets or discussing the problem for Ubuntu/Fedora/OSX, etc. A couple times i read, that the standard encoding under windows is cp-1252 which causes the problem. Can i somehow force windows using my console to use utf-8 for this session and then run pip with that?

Please don't recommend me renaming my user folder. It's not easily done under Windows 10 and i dont want to re-install windows just because of python.

My setup: Windows 10, Python 3.5.1, pip 8.0.3

Answer 1

Can you try the following and see if it works. Replace path for python by your actual path.
I am not able to simulate on my windows laptop.

import sys
import subprocess

reload(sys)  # Reload may do the trick!
sys.setdefaultencoding('UTF8')


theproc =subprocess.call(['C:\\Python27\\Scripts\\pip.exe', 'install', 'mysql-python'])
theproc.communicate()