gcloud crashed (UnicodeEncodeError): 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe7' in position 13: ordinal not in range(128) - gcloud

Question

Welcome to the Google Cloud SDK! Run "gcloud -h" to get the list of
available commands.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Cloud SDK>gcloud init Welcome! This
command will take you through the configuration of gcloud.
Your current configuration has been set to: [default]
You can skip diagnostics next time by using the following flag:
gcloud init --skip-diagnostics
Network diagnostic detects and fixes local network connection issues.
Checking network connection...done. Reachability Check passed. Network
diagnostic (1/1 checks) passed.
ERROR: gcloud crashed (UnicodeEncodeError): 'ascii' codec can't encode
character u'\xe7' in position 13: ordinal not in range(128)
If you would like to report this issue, please run the following
command: gcloud feedback
To check gcloud for common problems, please run the following command:
gcloud info --run-diagnostics
I don't know what to do... I just want to use the sdk but I can't init it...

Answer 1

Have a look at the file which gave error , edit the .py file to add following lines
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

Answer 2

Try edit the code in google-cloud-sdk/lib/third_party/socks/__init__.py(google-cloud-sdk is the archive you downloaded to install google cloud sdk) in line 262:
req = req + struct.pack(">H", destport)
to
if isinstance(req, unicode):
req = req.encode('UTF-8')
req = req + struct.pack(">H", destport)
reference: https://c11e.wodemo.com/gcloud-crashed-unicodedecodeerror

Answer 3

For me the fix was removing an accent ('é') from a folder in the path of my project. Hope it can help someone since I didn't find this solution after googling it for hours.

Answer 4

I kept getting this similar error every time I ran a gcloud command after a crash:
ERROR: gcloud crashed (UnicodeDecodeError): 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xa4 in position 1: invalid start byte
The solution was to delete this file:
~/.config/gcloud/gce
Don't ask me why that works or what that files does, I don't know (if you do, please let me know), but it gets recreated on the next command run and it fixed my issue.

Answer 5

In my case, it was a special character in the folders of the current directory. After changing the current directory, it worked!

Answer 6

As you’ve noticed that the error is due to a non-ASCII character in the username. As a workaround, you can set the CLOUDSDK_CONFIG environment variable to a path that contains only ASCII characters.