Invalid US-ASCII character “\xE2” on line 54 workaround
In this blog post I cover the infamous “Invalid US-ASCII character "\xE2" on line 54” error that seems to plague people when trying to serve their sites locally. OK, I actually don’t fix the problem but I create a workaround.
The problem
Have you ever ran into this issue?
Error: Invalid US-ASCII character "\xE2" on line 54
I ran into this issue when trying to serve my jekyll site locally
$ jekyll serve
And then this happened.
Configuration file: /Users/janmeppe/Github-blog/rainymood.github.io/_config.yml
Source: /Users/janmeppe/Github-blog/rainymood.github.io
Destination: /Users/janmeppe/Github-blog/rainymood.github.io/_site
Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
Generating...
Invalid theme folder: _sass
Remote Theme: Using theme mmistakes/minimal-mistakes
Jekyll Feed: Generating feed for posts
GitHub Metadata: No GitHub API authentication could be found. Some fields may be missing or have incorrect data.
Conversion error: Jekyll::Converters::Scss encountered an error while converting 'assets/css/main.scss':
Invalid US-ASCII character "\xE2" on line 54
jekyll 3.8.5 | Error: Invalid US-ASCII character "\xE2" on line 54
exit 1
The solution
After scouring the internet trying many solutions such as the solution presented here and this one, I found a very simple solution here that works great!
Create a new file called Rakefile with this content
task :build do
system "env LANG=\"en_US.UTF-8\" bundle exec jekyll serve"
end
This sets the locale encoding to the correct one and should allow you to serve your site locally, finally!
I spiced mine up a little bit and it looks like this
task :build do
system "env LANG=\"en_US.UTF-8\" bundle exec jekyll serve -l -o --drafts"
end
The -l flag turns on live reload, which makes the website rebuild automatically when it detects a change. The -o flag opens localhost when serving it and the --drafts flag allows me to create draft posts so that I can preview them locally before pushing them to my blog.
Now you can build the website using
$ rake build
Et voilà!
Configuration file: /Users/janmeppe/Github-blog/rainymood.github.io/_config.yml
Source: /Users/janmeppe/Github-blog/rainymood.github.io
Destination: /Users/janmeppe/Github-blog/rainymood.github.io/_site
Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
Generating...
Invalid theme folder: _sass
Remote Theme: Using theme mmistakes/minimal-mistakes
Jekyll Feed: Generating feed for posts
GitHub Metadata: No GitHub API authentication could be found. Some fields may be missing or have incorrect data.
done in 13.275 seconds.
Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/Users/janmeppe/Github-blog/rainymood.github.io'
Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000
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