Spacy: "ValueError: unknown locale: UTF-8" when using spacy

Created on 5 Dec 2017 · 4Comments · Source: explosion/spaCy

I'm running into problems when installing SpaCy and its language models through the terminal in MacOS.

Systeminformation:
MacOS 10.13.1
Python 3.6.3 :: Anaconda, Inc.
SpaCy 2.0.3

Installing SpaCy works just fine. conda install -c conda-forge spacy returns:

Fetching package metadata .............
Solving package specifications: .

Package plan for installation in environment /Users/phndrff/anaconda3:

The following NEW packages will be INSTALLED:

    spacy: 2.0.3-py36_0 conda-forge

Proceed ([y]/n)? y

Double checking it is still good:

# All requested packages already installed.
# packages in environment at /Users/phndrff/anaconda3:
#
spacy                     2.0.3                    py36_0    conda-forge

But as soon as I try to use spacy to download models or do anything else it runs into error messages, i.e. python -m spacy info --markdown:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/runpy.py", line 183, in _run_module_as_main
    mod_name, mod_spec, code = _get_module_details(mod_name, _Error)
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/runpy.py", line 142, in _get_module_details
    return _get_module_details(pkg_main_name, error)
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/runpy.py", line 109, in _get_module_details
    __import__(pkg_name)
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/spacy/__init__.py", line 4, in <module>
    from .cli.info import info as cli_info
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/spacy/cli/__init__.py", line 1, in <module>
    from .download import download
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/spacy/cli/download.py", line 10, in <module>
    from .link import link
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/spacy/cli/link.py", line 8, in <module>
    from ..util import prints
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/spacy/util.py", line 8, in <module>
    import regex as re
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/regex.py", line 683, in <module>
    _pattern_type = type(_compile("", 0, {}))
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/regex.py", line 436, in _compile
    pattern_locale = _getlocale()[1]
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/locale.py", line 581, in getlocale
    return _parse_localename(localename)
  File "/Users/phndrff/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/locale.py", line 490, in _parse_localename
    raise ValueError('unknown locale: %s' % localename)
ValueError: unknown locale: UTF-8

Oddly enough I was able to download one model yesterday after unistalling spacy and installing it again but I'm unable to reproduce it now.

I've seen similar problems in other issues (i.e. #1517) but their solution of setting export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 in ~/.bash_profile did not solve my issue anyway.

Any suggestions to solve this?

compat install

Source

pohndorff

Most helpful comment

Oh well .... I found a different solution that solved this issue at stackoverflow:

Besides adding LC_ALL you've to add the same value to LANG as well. So the entry in .bash_profile looks like this:

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Writing down problems might solve problems

pohndorff on 5 Dec 2017

👍16

All 4 comments

Oh well .... I found a different solution that solved this issue at stackoverflow:

Besides adding LC_ALL you've to add the same value to LANG as well. So the entry in .bash_profile looks like this:

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Writing down problems might solve problems

pohndorff on 5 Dec 2017

👍16

Thanks for updating with your solution – glad you got it working!

(I actually remember having this problem myself with some other library and setup – I chose to ignore the advice from StackOverflow because I thought "ah, it just can't be that simple" and spent another hour before I ended up back at LANG 🤦‍♀️)

ines on 5 Dec 2017

🎉1

I got the same issue, after trying the above solution I got the following:

usage: ipykernel_launcher.py [-h] [model]
ipykernel_launcher.py: error: unrecognized arguments: -f

An exception has occurred, use %tb to see the full traceback.

SystemExit: 2


/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/IPython/core/interactiveshell.py:2918: UserWarning: To exit: use 'exit', 'quit', or Ctrl-D.

How can I install the library?, thanks!