Problem
I'm trying to start a virtual environment with an environment variable using pipenv. These are the steps that I followed:
- I created a
pipenv virtual environment
- Ran
echo ENV_VAR=my_token > .env
- I started the virtual environment by running
pipenv shell
When I ran that last command, I received the error:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte
I'm using PowerShell on Windows 10.
Question
Why might this happen? Clearly is some odd character getting in there, but I'm using a normal keyboard.
Context
If I simply create my .env file instead, everything works as expected. Is there something weird that happens with echo?
Additional
As requested by Giacomo Catenazzi below, I've looked at the file using Notepad++. It is in UTF-16 BOM. So the echo command simply does not work very well with PowerShell to write to UTF-8.
