👔 Change sidecar values from bytestrings to strings

Author: shnizzedy

CPAC/utils/bids_utils.py

@@ -324,7 +324,10 @@ def bids_retrieve_params(bids_config_dict, f_dict, dbg=False):
 
     for k, v in params.items():
         if isinstance(v, str):
-            params[k] = v.encode("ascii", errors="ignore")
+            # Force all strings to be ASCII-compatible UTF-8
+            params[k] = v.encode("ascii", errors="ignore").decode(
+                "utf-8", errors="ignore"
+            )
 
     return params