Problem Installing IJulia on Windows 7

[DimitriKolnikov]

Hi,
My problem seems close to Issue #363, however the patch does not seem to work for me.

When trying to build IJulia, I get the following message:

julia> Pkg.build("IJulia")
INFO: Building WinRPM
INFO: Downloading https://cache.e.ip.saba.us/http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win32/openSUSE_13.1/repodata/repomd.xml
INFO: Downloading https://cache.e.ip.saba.us/http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win64/openSUSE_13.1/repodata/repomd.xml
INFO: Building Nettle
INFO: Building ZMQ
INFO: Building IJulia
INFO: Found Jupyter version 3.2.0: ipython
============================================================================[ ERROR: IJulia ]====================================================================
invalid ASCII sequence
while loading c:\Users\Dimitri Kolnikov.julia\v0.3\IJulia\deps\build.jl, in expression starting on line 64

and the line 64 in the build file is:

append!(kernelcmd_array, ["-F", joinpath(ijulia_dir,"src","kernel.jl"), "{connection_file}"])

It seems a bit obscure to me...
If somebody could help ...
Thanks in advance ...

[greenflash1357]

I wanted to open the same issue.
I'm using Windows 10, Julia 3.11, Python 2.7, IPython 3.2 and IJulia 1.1.4.

I think the error is due to non ASCII characters in your IJulia directory (home directory). Maybe your user name contains special characters?

I could build Julia after manually writing the kernelcmd_array. But I think this could be done automatically.

Unfortunately joinpath() returns an ASCIIString (line 62 in build.jl) if possible. Using an UTF8String solved the issue for me. But there is no implicit conversion, when calling append!() in line 64.

[stevengj]

Thanks for the bug report. It should be fixed now — try Pkg.checkout("IJulia"); Pkg.build("IJulia") to get the latest version.

The problem was that kernelcmd_array was initialized to an array of a few strings, and then a few more strings were appended. If the first few strings were ASCII, then it was initialized to an array of ASCIIString, and the error you saw was thrown if the appended strings were non-ASCII. The solution was to explicitly declare a Unicode string type when initializing the array.

[greenflash1357]

The fix works for me.
Thanks.

[DimitriKolnikov]

It works for me too.
Thanks a lot for your reactivity !