title: pip installation of gensim - 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 53
body: <p>I am trying to install gensim using pip on my Virtual Machine. However, I get the error :</p>
  
  <pre><code>Command /usr/bin/python -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip_build_root/scipy/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-jM6uSL-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip_build_root/scipy
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/usr/local/bin/pip", line 11, in &lt;module&gt;
      sys.exit(main())
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/__init__.py", line 185, in main
      return command.main(cmd_args)
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/basecommand.py", line 161, in main
      text = '\n'.join(complete_log)
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 53: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I did look for similar issues on SO, and found <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20555761/pip-install-pandas-gives-unicodedecodeerror-ascii-codec-cant-decode-byte-0">`pip install pandas` gives UnicodeDecodeError: &#39;ascii&#39; codec can&#39;t decode byte 0xe2 in position 41: ordinal not in range(128)</a> to be the closest one. However, I did try updating pip to the latest version.</p>
  
  <p>The pip version details</p>
  
  <pre><code>pip 1.5.6 from /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages (python 2.7)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any thoughts for this?</p>