Hello Brani,

I don't know if you have tried to run other tools on your file, or if you have tried this same operation on the public Main instance at http://usegalaxy.org, but my guess is that you will run into the same issue.

One path is to convert the UNICODE characters to ASCII. This prior Q&A covers the details. The included link to the Trello card is still active and can be followed & up-voted:
http://dev.list.galaxyproject.org/Tool-Error-Failure-Preparing-Job-td4660512.html

There is a longer work-around included in this more recent thread (near the end, the dist John is talking about went out Feb 10th). I wouldn't be able to help with the details of implementation if you run into problems, but John possibly could, if this is something you want to try.
http://dev.list.galaxyproject.org/error-with-unicode-output-td4662783.html

Hopefully one of these works out for you,

Jen
Galaxy team

On 2/21/14 8:04 AM, Cantarel, Brandi L. wrote:

Hi,
I am testing my newly installed galaxy instance. When I try to use a simple tool like fastq_to_fasta, I get the following error:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\ufffd' in position 693: ordinal not in range(256)
Anyone know how I can fix this?

Thanks!
Brandi

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Brandi Cantarel, PhD
Bioinformatics Research Scientist
Baylor Institute for Immunology Research
Baylor Health Care System
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