weird unicode error with sparrow* bower and package files

[balmas]

I ran into a weird error today using the Sparrow* javascript packages in a Python app (perseids-client-apps) in Python 3.4 running under mod_wsgi in Apache 2.4 (Ubuntu 14.04). flask_bower.bower_url_for would crash loading the packages with the following error:

File "/usr/lib/python3.4/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode return codecs.ascii_decode(input,self.errors)[0] UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 155: ordinal not in range(128)

Even after setting the fileencoding of the packages to utf-8 (in vim) it still failed. I had to remove the accented e in @PonteIneptique 's name in them and then the problem went away.

I'm not sure if there is really an error in the encoding of that char in those files, or if it's some weird bug that only happens in my environment. Notably, there was absolutely no problem running the code directly, only when loaded via mod_wsgi in Apache. Note too that this error doesn't occur in the Perseids production environment, but that environment is using Apache 2.2 instead of 2.4, for whatever that is worth.