fix: use UTF-8 encoding for CLI file output on Windows#1789
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Br1an67 wants to merge 1 commit intounclecode:mainfrom
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fix: use UTF-8 encoding for CLI file output on Windows#1789Br1an67 wants to merge 1 commit intounclecode:mainfrom
Br1an67 wants to merge 1 commit intounclecode:mainfrom
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On Windows, open() defaults to the system encoding (e.g. cp1252) which cannot encode all Unicode characters. This causes a 'charmap' codec error when writing crawled content to files. Explicitly set encoding='utf-8' on all file writes in the CLI. Fixes unclecode#1762
This was referenced Mar 1, 2026
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Summary
On Windows,
open()defaults to the system encoding (e.g. cp1252/charmap) which cannot encode all Unicode characters. When crawled content contains characters like×(U+00D7), writing to file fails with'charmap' codec can't encode character.The fix explicitly sets
encoding='utf-8'on all file write operations in the CLI.Fixes #1762
List of files changed and why
crawl4ai/cli.py— Addedencoding='utf-8'to all 4open(output_file, 'w')callsHow Has This Been Tested?
Verified that all file write paths now use UTF-8 encoding, which supports the full Unicode range.
Checklist: