Upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04 do-release-upgrade fails

Solution 1:

had a similar problem (same error but different character). fix was to edit /var/lib/dpkg/status and remove the offending character. In my case it was the davmail package.

Also found its been around for a while and caused other issues: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/foundations-bugs/2012-November/125607.html

"Maintainer: Mickaël Guessant" That (ë) isn't encoded in UTF-8 :(

You may have a similar issue. If you know some Python you can write a script to detect where the problem is in your case.

Solution 2:

This is a confirmed bug that doesn't affect enough people to warrant fixing so far. If you are effected subscribe to this bug report and leave a comment:

• do-release-upgrade crashes with message : "UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xae in position 337: invalid start byte" Edit

In my experience the more people effected by a bug the more chances it will get fixed.