UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters

[sitahoo]

Hi, when i run rMATs 4.2.0 ,i got this error message:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/share/work/biosoft/conda/miniconda3/envs/rmats/bin/rmats.py", line 596, in
main()
File "/share/work/biosoft/conda/miniconda3/envs/rmats/bin/rmats.py", line 564, in main
run_pipe(args)
File "rmatspipeline/rmatspipeline.pyx", line 3865, in rmats.rmatspipeline.run_pipe
File "", line 15, in string.from_py.__pyx_convert_string_from_py_std__in_string
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 85-89: ordinal not in range(128)

I wander why this error occurs and how to solve it？
thanks，
Hu

[EricKutschera]

This is the line for the error:
https://github.com/Xinglab/rmats-turbo/blob/v4.2.0/rMATS_pipeline/rmatspipeline/rmatspipeline.pyx#L3865

It's calling a compiled function and one of the arguments is the bam file names. My guess is that one of your bam file names or one of the directory names in the path of a bam file includes a unicode character. The compiled code can only handle ascii characters: https://github.com/Xinglab/rmats-turbo/blob/v4.2.0/rMATS_pipeline/rmatspipeline/rmatspipeline.pyx#L9

I was able to get a similar error message by using a bam file with Æ in the name. I think you can avoid this issue by renaming your input files to use only ascii characters. Alternatively, it may be possible to recompile the code yourself with the cython encoding parameters from this post: cython/cython#2819 (comment)