UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 0: invalid continuation byte

[Computatrum42]

Diagnostic output

jrnl: v4.2.1
Python: 3.13.2 (main, Feb 5 2025, 08:05:21) [GCC 14.2.1 20250128]
OS: Linux 6.13.8-arch1-1

What are you trying to do?

When I write something that contains letter "ğ", the jrnl outputs this error message.

┏━ Error ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ UnicodeDecodeError ┃
┃ 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 0: invalid continuation byte ┃
┃ ┃
┃ This is probably a bug. Please file an issue at: ┃
┃ https://github.com/jrnl-org/jrnl/issues/new/choose ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

What have you tried?

I tried the convert the journal file to UTF-8 format.

Other Information

No response

[micahellison]

Hi @Computatrum42, I'm not sure what's causing this error. I know I can't reproduce it with the same version of jrnl installed via pipx on Linux Mint. It could be a problem in the packaging of the repository you're using to install jrnl on Arch.

When exactly do you hit the error? For instance, is it only from the command line like so:

$ jrnl ğ

Or is it while entering in the built-in editor like so:

$ jrnl
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃  Writing Entry                                     ┃
┃  To finish writing, press Ctrl+d on a blank line.  ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
ğ

Or when viewing entries that contain this character like so?

$ jrnl -2
2025-04-20 01:53:37 PM ğ

2025-04-20 01:53:48 PM ğ

Or all of the above?

Whatever the case, if you add --debug to the command that is generating this error, then paste the output here, that could help us narrow it down. Though, caution, you might want to obfuscate the config portion of that output for your privacy if you take this approach.