google gsutil: ascii codec can't encode character

Question

I'm trying to sync my local folder on google cloud nearline storage, but I get the following error:

"Caught non-retryable exception while listing file:///var/lib/..: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 170: ordinal not in range(128)
CommandException: Caught non-retryable exception - aborting rsync
Caught ^C - exiting"

Is there any solution please? Thank you.

Change the names of your folders in A-Za-z0-9 and some special characters only also avoid using very large names for folders, as this may increase length of the path string resulting in the error. — ZdaR
Thank you for your answer anmol_uppal, but I tried to sync also a file in an "A-Za-z0-9" folder name, but the error persist. I guess it regards the character encoding different from UTF-8. — Francesco Pedrotti

Jordan Jordan · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-24T23:10:36

It looks like you have an accented e - é located in a filename that you are attempting to sync.

Using UTF-8 for all object names and filenames will ensure that gsutil doesn’t encounter character encoding errors while operating on the files. Unfortunately, it’s still possible that files uploaded / downloaded this way can have interoperability problems, for a number of reasons unrelated to gsutil; example: copying filenames across different platforms like Linux and Windows. If you are using the Windows console you can specify wildcards or folders (using the -R option) rather than explicitly named individual files in order to prevent this.

If you have too many files you can use a tool to convert the old character encoding to UTF-8. One such tool is native2ascii.

google gsutil: ascii codec can't encode character

2 Answers