From 2310f82e75dd6b7ff8a47ee28d62afa62a409c9d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Thomas A Caswell <tcaswell@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 21:01:22 -0400
Subject: [PATCH] BUG : skip looking up expanduser if unicode error

closes #3516 by ignoring the real problem.

The real problem seems to be in the core libary (
http://bugs.python.org/issue13207) to which the response was
'upgrade to python 3'.
---
 lib/matplotlib/__init__.py | 3 +++
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)

diff --git a/lib/matplotlib/__init__.py b/lib/matplotlib/__init__.py
index 25d7e04f3103..1df7b5863743 100644
--- a/lib/matplotlib/__init__.py
+++ b/lib/matplotlib/__init__.py
@@ -510,6 +510,9 @@ def _get_home():
     except ImportError:
         # This happens on Google App Engine (pwd module is not present).
         pass
+    except UnicodeDecodeError:
+        # this happens on windows with py2k with non-ascii letters in the path
+        pass
     else:
         if os.path.isdir(path):
             return path