Error in MRIQC: UnicodeDecodeError with docker AND singularity images

Hi I have encountered a new issue with MRIQC. The same issue arises with either my docker image of mriqc that is running locally or the singularity image that is running on a distant cluster.

Here is the error message:

singularity run --cleanenv -B /scratch/jsein/BIDS:/work /scratch/jsein/my_images/mriqc-latest.simg /work/Convers /work/Convers/derivatives/mriqc participant --participant-label 26 -w /work/temp_data_Convers --ica
2019-10-15 19:47:17,640 mriqc:IMPORTANT
Running MRIQC version 0.15.2rc1:
* BIDS dataset path: /work/Convers.
* Output folder: /work/Convers/derivatives/mriqc.
* Analysis levels: participant.

Process Process-2:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/local/miniconda/lib/python3.7/multiprocessing/process.py”, line 297, in _bootstrap
self.run()
File “/usr/local/miniconda/lib/python3.7/multiprocessing/process.py”, line 99, in run
self._target(self._args, **self._kwargs)
File “/usr/local/miniconda/lib/python3.7/site-packages/mriqc/bin/mriqc_run.py”, line 400, in init_mriqc
ignore=[‘derivatives’, ‘sourcedata’, r’^…
’])
File “/usr/local/miniconda/lib/python3.7/site-packages/bids/layout/layout.py”, line 185, in init
self._validate_root()
File “/usr/local/miniconda/lib/python3.7/site-packages/bids/layout/layout.py”, line 330, in _validate_root
self.description = json.load(desc_fd)
File “/usr/local/miniconda/lib/python3.7/json/init.py”, line 293, in load
return loads(fp.read(),
File “/usr/local/miniconda/lib/python3.7/codecs.py”, line 322, in decode
(result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: ‘utf-8’ codec can’t decode byte 0xe9 in position 150: invalid continuation byte

This happens today but on subjects that were running fine with the same docker image a few days ago.
I tried with different images: v:0.14.2 and v: 0.15.2rc1

It looks very strange to me. Could it be linked to a recent docker upgrade?

Never mind. I found the origin of the error: in the file dataset_description, some authors’ names where spelled with a French punctuation (“é”) and that made MRIQC crashing. It was not the case before.
Good to know!

Cheers,

Julien