PIP Install Numpy throws an error "ascii codec can't decode byte 0xe2"

I have a freshly installed Ubuntu on a freshly built computer. I just installed python-pip using apt-get. Now when I try to pip install Numpy and Pandas, it gives the following error.

I've seen this error mentioned in quite a few places on SO and Google, but I haven't been able to find a solution. Some people mention it's a bug, some threads are just dead... What's going on?

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/pip", line 9, in <module>
    load_entry_point('pip==1.5.4', 'console_scripts', 'pip')()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/__init__.py", line 185, in main
    return command.main(cmd_args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/basecommand.py", line 161, in main
    text = '\n'.join(complete_log)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 72: ordinal not in range(128)

I had this exact problem recently and used

apt-get install python-numpy

This adds numpy to your system python interpreter. I may have had to do the same for matplotlib. To use in a virtualenv, you have to create your environment using the

--system-site-packages

option

http://www.scipy.org/install.html

For me @Charles Duffy comment solved it. Put this in your env:

LC_ALL=C

You can add it to your .bashrc with a line like this:

export LC_ALL=C

But take in care that you'll affect all other programs. So you may want to use it just for the pip run:

$ LC_ALL=C pip install ...

Try updating pip:

pip install -U pip

I had that problem with matplotlib package. I had to execute:

export LC_ALL=C
pip install --upgrade setuptools

For me this was solved by ignoring a (presumably) corrupted cache with

pip install --no-cache-dir ...

as described here: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/2674

PIP Install Numpy throws an error "ascii codec can't decode byte 0xe2"

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