Unicode Normalization not appropriate for ASCII-8BIT

This issues appeared in Cocoapods 1.11.0 and as many already noticed rolling back to 1.10.2 fixes the issue. But the original issue comes from wrong locale set in the terminal. It has to be a UTF-8-based locale.

You can run 'locale' in the terminal to check current locale settings. It should be something like this:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

If you have ascii-based locales set or "C" (which is also an ascii locale) then run

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

If you prefer some other locale (not en_US) then run locale -a to see the list of available options and pick UTF-8 locale you prefer.

Actually CocoaPods warns that UTF-8 locale is required:

WARNING: CocoaPods requires your terminal to be using UTF-8 encoding.
    Consider adding the following to ~/.profile:

    export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

But before 1.11.0 it was required only in case you use pods which contain non-ascii symbols in their names (Chinese for example) but starting 1.11.0 it become more strict. There is a discussion on Cocoapods GitHub about it: https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues/10939

The answer of Vyacheslav Kormushkin worked for me.

Concretely, what I did was:

• open Terminal
• type open ~/.zshrc (or .profile if you don't use zsh)
• add export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8, and save the file
• go back to Terminal
• type source ~/.zshrc
• type locale

==> The locale will now be fixed

==> You can now safely run pod update or pod install

I had the same problem but using React Native, the following worked for me(direct):

LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pod install

First solution is, to remove your current version of the cocoapods and rolling back to 1.10.2

To remove your current version, you could just run:

sudo gem uninstall cocoapods

then you can install the 1.10.2 version of cocoa pods via the following command:

sudo gem install cocoapods -v 1.10.2

The second solution is, to install the cocoapods via Homebrew with the following command:

brew install cocoapods

If you using cocoapods 1.12.1v

Add three lines below to three files : ~/.zshrc ; ~/.profile ; ~/.bash_profile and restart your mac

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

If you are here because of the failure outputs from Github actions. Try my solution:

add this to the top level of your github workflow yml file:

env:
  LANG: en_US.UTF-8

ref: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/environment-variables

I faced the same issue and I added export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 in my .profile also, tried all other options. Finally, I tried invalidating the cache and it worked for me.

Steps to invalidate the cache:

1. Android Studio File->Invalidate Caches
2. In the new pop-up check the box whichever you want to clear. Click Invalidate and Restart.

After the IDE restart, the pod install got succeeded.

if you have installed cocoapods using brew, run:

brew remove cocoapods

after that, install cocoapods using gem:

sudo gem install cocoapods -v 1.10.1

If you are experiencing this just with android studio, go to settings and change the configuration of the terminal Shell path.

1. Open settings
2. Search terminal or navigate to Tools -> Terminal
3. Change the Shell Path from /bin/bash to /bin/zsh
4. Apply and close

There is no need to uninstall anything.