python unable to start in virtual environment in VS code: UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte

Question

I recently used windows' virtual environment to set up the environment in order to run PyTorch deep learning code.

Starting from the very simplistic code in PyTorch's official tutorial, I managed to run the code for the first time. However, after my first running and executing "python" in command line, it shows:

(venv) PS C:\Users\xxx\demo_pytorch\venv> python
Fatal Python error: initsite: Failed to import the site module
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\xxx\Miniconda3\lib\site.py", line 579, in <module>
    main()
  File "C:\Users\xxx\Miniconda3\lib\site.py", line 562, in main
    known_paths = venv(known_paths)
  File "C:\Users\xxx\Miniconda3\lib\site.py", line 494, in venv
    addsitepackages(known_paths, [sys.prefix])
  File "C:\Users\xxx\Miniconda3\lib\site.py", line 349, in addsitepackages
    addsitedir(sitedir, known_paths)
  File "C:\Users\xxx\Miniconda3\lib\site.py", line 207, in addsitedir
    addpackage(sitedir, name, known_paths)
  File "C:\Users\xxx\Miniconda3\lib\site.py", line 163, in addpackage
    for n, line in enumerate(f):
  File "C:\Users\xxx\Miniconda3\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 0x90 in position 654: character maps to <undefined>

Can anyone tell me how to fix this? The default python in the VS code has been set as.\Scripts\python.exe

Answer 1

It seems like the file encoding caused this. If you have code:

file = open(filename)

you need to change it to:

file = open(filename, encoding="utf8")

you can refer to this page or another page for more information.