Catch enconding errors when reading the .readthedocs.yaml file

[AlexsLaboratory]

Details:

• Project URL: https://readthedocs.org/projects/TripalGeoServerAPI/
• Build URL(if applicable): https://readthedocs.org/projects/tripalgeoserverapi/builds/14699679/
• Read the Docs username(if applicable): Lowe-Man

Expected Result

I expected it to build the documentation using conda as the python environment manager

Actual Result

The result that turned out was a build error and I have no idea why as the error is not giving me much to work with in terms of troubleshooting.

[astrojuanlu]

Looks like the project is building again. Similar to #8474. Root causes still under investigation, we can't provide much information yet.

[humitos]

It seems like the project was deleted. I think we can close this issue. Feel free to re-open if it's still valid.

[astrojuanlu]

It was not deleted, but the original URL had incorrect capitalization I think https://readthedocs.org/projects/tripalgeoserverapi/

[humitos]

Oh, OK! Interesting that the build URL doesn't work either.

In any case, the latest 4 builds in that project did work https://readthedocs.org/projects/tripalgeoserverapi/builds/ so I think this was a temporal error too.

@Lowe-Man please, report back if you keep having this issue.

[AlexsLaboratory]

Oh, OK! Interesting that the build URL doesn't work either.

In any case, the latest 4 builds in that project did work https://readthedocs.org/projects/tripalgeoserverapi/builds/ so I think this was a temporal error too.

@Lowe-Man please, report back if you keep having this issue.

So the issue was that the .readthedocs.yaml file was for some reason encoded using something other than UTF-8. So the characters were coming up in what looked to be in Japanese or Chinese. After going into my IDE and changing the enoding for that file everything was resolved. I figured all of this out after installing readthedocs on a virtual machine to get a more descript error message.

[stsewd]

I think we can catch that error and show a useful message to the user.

[humitos]

So the issue was that the .readthedocs.yaml file was for some reason encoded using something other than UTF-8.

In #10922 we added an extra line when showing this error message to give users a hit about this particular issue: https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org/blob/main/readthedocs/config/notifications.py#L20