The problem could be your system's locale setting. Perhaps LANG is not set to a utf-8 capable locale.

$ locale
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=
$ uname -a
Darwin x4430 10.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.8.0: Tue Jun  7 16:33:36 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1504.15.3~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Does it look OK?

The locale settings look ok.

I'd try upgrading your perl. 5.12.3 is rather old, and the code that is failing is part of perl.

I'm still not able to use Ikiwiki on Mac:

$ ikiwiki --setup ./web.setup
generating wrappers..
rebuilding wiki..
Cannot decode string with wide characters at /opt/local/lib/perl5/5.12.4/darwin-thread-multi-2level/Encode.pm line 174.


$ ls -la /opt/local/bin/perl*
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin     20 Oct 21 12:06 /opt/local/bin/perl -> /opt/local/bin/perl5
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin     23 Oct 21 12:06 /opt/local/bin/perl5 -> /opt/local/bin/perl5.12
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin   9896 Jun 26 01:39 /opt/local/bin/perl5.12
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin      8 Jun 26 01:39 /opt/local/bin/perl5.12.4 -> perl5.12
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin  10000 Jun 26 01:55 /opt/local/bin/perl5.14
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin      8 Jun 26 01:56 /opt/local/bin/perl5.14.2 -> perl5.14
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin  10000 Aug 23 13:41 /opt/local/bin/perl5.16
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin      8 Aug 23 13:42 /opt/local/bin/perl5.16.1 -> perl5.16
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin     12 Oct 21 11:44 /opt/local/bin/perlbug -> perlbug-5.16
-rwxr-xr-x  2 root  admin  45815 Jun 26 01:39 /opt/local/bin/perlbug-5.12
-rwxr-xr-x  2 root  admin  45203 Jun 26 01:55 /opt/local/bin/perlbug-5.14
-rwxr-xr-x  2 root  admin  41712 Aug 23 13:41 /opt/local/bin/perlbug-5.16
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin     12 Oct 21 11:44 /opt/local/bin/perldoc -> perldoc-5.16
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin    244 Jun 26 01:39 /opt/local/bin/perldoc-5.12
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin    244 Jun 26 01:55 /opt/local/bin/perldoc-5.14
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin    244 Aug 23 13:41 /opt/local/bin/perldoc-5.16
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin     12 Oct 21 11:44 /opt/local/bin/perlivp -> perlivp-5.16
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin  12484 Jun 26 01:39 /opt/local/bin/perlivp-5.12
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin  12297 Jun 26 01:55 /opt/local/bin/perlivp-5.14
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin  10802 Aug 23 13:41 /opt/local/bin/perlivp-5.16
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin     15 Oct 21 11:44 /opt/local/bin/perlthanks -> perlthanks-5.16
-rwxr-xr-x  2 root  admin  45815 Jun 26 01:39 /opt/local/bin/perlthanks-5.12
-rwxr-xr-x  2 root  admin  45203 Jun 26 01:55 /opt/local/bin/perlthanks-5.14
-rwxr-xr-x  2 root  admin  41712 Aug 23 13:41 /opt/local/bin/perlthanks-5.16

If I simply relink /opt/local/bin/perl to a newer version of perl such as /opt/local/bin/perl5.16, it still doesn't work, as it seems

$ ikiwiki -version
ikiwiki version 3.20110608

simply force to use perl5.12.

Looks like the MacPorts ikiwiki package is old. I use ikiwiki from pkgsrc as mentioned in ikiwiki on mac os x. I also maintain the package, so it's updated regularly.

This exact same problem has been stopping me from using Ikiwiki locally. I'm still able to push to remote Ikiwiki instance. But I'd like to push it to local repo and have the website built locally first so I can confirm everything runs fine. Everytime I try to build it locally, i have this exact same problem.

According to this page nothing has changed in MacPorts' ikiwiki build. Have you tried contacting the package maintainer or, failing that, submitting an update request to the relevant mailing list?

If MacPorts is this behind the times, it doesn't make sense to me to recommend it to anyone. But I'm biased in favor of pkgsrc, so I don't feel comfortable editing the ikiwiki on Mac OS X page to promote the thing I happen to prefer... but pkgsrc has Perl 5.18, and I keep pkgsrc's ikiwiki package updated at every release. --schmonz