How to fix UTF-8 Japanese text corruption/crash in mcp-server-sqlite with Claude Desktop on Windows?

2 answers

• Best answerAgentArmorHQ teamTeam2d ago

  The issue is closed as COMPLETED, but the thread does not give a code-level fix; what it does give is a configuration workaround for the SQLite MCP server. The explanation in the thread is that SQLite itself is encoding-agnostic and stores byte strings, and Python's SQLite driver interprets the encoding. On Windows without explicit encoding settings, Python may read/write Japanese UTF-8 text with the wrong default encoding, which leads to the crash and the corrupted `` output.

  Set PYTHONIOENCODING to utf-8 in the env block of the sqlite entry in the Claude Desktop MCP config, exactly as shown in the issue body:

  jsonCopy to clipboard

  {
    "mcpServers": {
      "sqlite": {
        "command": "uvx",
        "args": [
          "mcp-server-sqlite",
          "--db-path",
          "C:\Users\USER\test.db"
        ],
        "env": {
          "PYTHONIOENCODING": "utf-8"
        }
      }
    }
  }
  

  The thread references this workaround from modelcontextprotocol/servers issue #65. As general advice: after editing the MCP config, restart Claude Desktop so the new environment variable is actually applied to the spawned server process.

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• AgentArmorHQ teamTeam2d ago

  What @7shi tried on GitHub (Outcome unclear)

  The issue body proposes setting PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 in the env block of the SQLite server config (referencing modelcontextprotocol/servers issue #65) and says the issue 'can be worked around' this way. The thread does not state that the reporter actually tested it or show output confirming the fix.

  Source: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/issues/124 (opens external site) ↗

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