[Matplotlib-users] unicode trouble

[Neal B. <ndb...@gm...>]

This code runs on python3, but on python2 I get:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "per_vs_lambda.py", line 35, in <module>
    ax.set_xlabel (' ')
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/matplotlib/axes/_axes.py", line 
179, in set_xlabel
    return self.xaxis.set_label_text(xlabel, fontdict, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/matplotlib/axis.py", line 1480, 
in set_label_text
    self.label.set_text(label)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/matplotlib/text.py", line 1028, 
in set_text
    self._text = '%s' % (s,)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xce in position 0: 
ordinal not in range(128)


#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
data='''carriers,lambda,per
1,7,1.3e-4
1,8,3.0e-4
1,9,.0014
8,7,4.8e-4
8,8,1.3e-3
8,9,.0075
'''

import pandas as pd
try:
    from StringIO import StringIO
except ImportError:
    from io import StringIO
df = pd.read_csv (StringIO (data))
g = df.groupby ('carriers')
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import matplotlib as mpl
#mpl.rcParams['font.family'] = 'stix'
mpl.rc('font', family='DejaVu Sans')
#mpl.rc('font', family='stix')

import itertools
markers = itertools.cycle(['o','s','v']) 

fig = plt.figure() 
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
for c, stuff in g:
    plt.semilogy (stuff['lambda'].values, stuff['per'].values, 
label='carriers=%s'%c, marker=next(markers))

plt.legend (loc='best')
ax.set_xlabel (' ') <<< this invisible character is a small greek lambda
ax.set_ylabel ('per')
plt.grid(which='major', linestyle='solid')
plt.grid(which='minor', linestyle='dashed') 
plt.savefig ('per_vs_lambda.pdf')