I can't create a package

Question

I have installed ROS. I did the first two ROS/Tutorials (1. Installing and Configuring Your ROS Environment and 2. Navigating the ROS Filesystem) without problems. However, in the third (Creating a ROS Package) I have problem creating my package.

I do: $ cd ~/ros_workspace $ roscreate-pkg beginner_tutorials std_msgs rospy roscpp

and I get:

Created package directory /home/juliocesar/ros_workspace/beginner_tutorials
Created include directory  /home/juliocesar/ros_workspace/beginner_tutorials/include/beginner_tutorials
Created cpp source directory /home/juliocesar/ros_workspace/beginner_tutorials/src
Created package file /home/juliocesar/ros_workspace/beginner_tutorials/Makefile
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/ros/electric/ros/bin/roscreate-pkg", line 35, in <module>
roscreate.roscreatepkg.roscreatepkg_main()
  File "/opt/ros/electric/ros/tools/roscreate/src/roscreate/roscreatepkg.py", line 126, in roscreatepkg_main
create_package(package, author_name(), depends, uses_roscpp=uses_roscpp, uses_rospy=uses_rospy)
  File "/opt/ros/electric/ros/tools/roscreate/src/roscreate/roscreatepkg.py", line 94, in create_package
f.write(contents)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xed' in position 122: ordinal not in range(128)

It isn't like it must be, and the next commands don't work of course.

I don't know how to solve it...

Thanks.

---

Originally posted by jcgarciaca on ROS Answers with karma: 67 on 2012-04-16

Post score: 0

---

Original comments

Comment by CaptainTrunky on 2012-04-16:
I'm not very good in Python and rospackage, but can you try to do next?

1. backup "/opt/ros/electric/ros/tools/roscreate/src/roscreate/roscreatepkg.py" :)

2. change code in line 94, in create_package from

   f.write(contents)

to

f.write(contents.encode('utf8'))

Comment by joq on 2012-04-16:
What operating system and Python version are you using? Which ROS distribution?

Answer 1

I had the same problem. It turns out that I have a special character in my username that is being written to the manifest.xml, which is being created after the Makefile.

My simple solution is to remove that character from my username.

---

Originally posted by Karl Damkjær Hansen with karma: 139 on 2012-04-22

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1