QGIS » QGIS Application

Hi there:

In QGIS versions 2.16 and above on Windows 10, the description field of the general section of metadata.txt seems not to be properly decoded if it contains UTF-8 characters.

Please, find attached two versions of plugin SEC4QGIS . Version 1.0.2 has an Unicode character at the description, which causes QGIS (if version >= 2.16) to crash when you run it after installing the plugin. I mean, you have to install the v1.0.2 plugin, run QGIS, close QGIS, and run QGIS again. This is the error message I get after that sequence:

An error occurred during execution of following code:
import pyplugin_installer
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\\xf3' in position 36: ordinal not in range(128)
Python version:
2.7.5 (default, May 15 2013, 22:44:16) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)]
QGIS version:
2.16.2 'Nødebo', 979e1a2

And after clicking Close then this window appears next:

An error occurred during execution of following code:
pyplugin_installer.initPluginInstaller()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
NameError: name 'pyplugin_installer' is not defined
Python version:
2.7.5 (default, May 15 2013, 22:44:16) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)]
QGIS version:
2.16.2 'Nødebo', 979e1a2

If you try SEC4QGIS v1.0.3 it will run without problems, and the only difference between both versions (apart from the PDF help file) is on metadata.txt.

Curiously enough, this bug does not affect some other fields like about, which also contains Unicode characters on both versions of the plugin.

It does not affect version 2.14 either.