TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported

[Neil Dewar]

Firstly, a couple of disclaimers:

• I'm not a pro developer, and I'm relatively new to Python and Spyder, so this could easily be user error
• I'm aware of the similar - but not quite the same - bug 2277

Environmental Details:

• Mac running OSX 10.9.5
• Spyder 2.3.4 installed through Anaconda
• Python 2.7.9 64bits, Qt 4.8.6, PyQt4 (API v2) 4.11.3 on Darwin

I've written a python file that imports (amongst other things) scrapy.crawler, that fails during debugging when I call

crawler.configure()

I see in the IPython console the error:

  File "/Users/neildewar/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/spyderlib/widgets/externalshell/sitecustomize.py", line 432, in notify_spyder

    fname = unicode(fname, "utf-8")

TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported

This symptom is identical to the symptom reported in 2277, but my situation differs in that I'm not (knowingly) using 

pdb.set_trace()

Also, greenorca reported being able to locate breakpoints in the imported module and that removing them resolve the issue.  I can find no breakpoints in sitecustomize.py (though I'm unclear if this is where greenorca found them).

Please can you advise:

• Is this the same issue as 2277?
• If not, is it a bug and should I post on GitHub?
• Is there anything I can do to work around the issue?   (eg, where are the breakpoints that need to be removed)

Many thanks