Installation Fails due to UnicodeDecodeError when Reading README.md

[alciobanu]

I am trying to install the Multiscale_PHATE package on my Windows machine using pip, but the installation fails when preparing metadata with a UnicodeDecodeError. Here's the error message I receive:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 2, in
File "", line 34, in
File "C:\Users\WKS\Desktop\Alin\GitHub\Multiscale_PHATE\setup.py", line 23, in
readme = open("README.md").read()
File "C:\Users\WKS\anaconda3\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 23, in decode
return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 3607: character maps to

The error seems to occur when the setup.py script tries to open and read the README.md file, and there's a character at position 3607 that it can't decode using the cp1252 encoding.

I have tried changing my system's default encoding to UTF-8 and even manually saving the README.md file in UTF-8 encoding, but the error persists.

I would appreciate any help or guidance you can provide to resolve this issue.

Thank you,
alciobanu