[Bug]: CLI Error charmap

[software-devs-gh]

crawl4ai version

0.8.0

Expected Behavior

file is created without exceptions

Current Behavior

input crwl https://aggregate.digital -o markdown-fit -O test.md
output Error: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\xd7' in position 13795: character maps to

Is this reproducible?

Yes

Inputs Causing the Bug

Steps to Reproduce

Code snippets

OS

Windows

Python version

3.13.5

Browser

No response

Browser version

No response

Error logs & Screenshots (if applicable)

No response

[ntohidi]

Root Cause

Classic Windows encoding bug. All 5 open(..., "w") calls in crawl4ai/cli.py are missing encoding="utf-8":

┌──────┬───────────────────────────────┐
│ Line │ Context │
├──────┼───────────────────────────────┤
│ 58 │ save_global_config() — writing YAML config │
├──────┼───────────────────────────────┤
│ 1255 │ -o all — writing JSON dump │
├──────┼───────────────────────────────┤
│ 1262 │ -o json — writing extracted content │
├──────┼───────────────────────────────┤
│ 1265 │ -o markdown — writing raw markdown │
├──────┼───────────────────────────────┤
│ 1274 │ -o markdown-fit — writing fit markdown (the reported bug) │
└──────┴───────────────────────────────┘

On Windows, open(file, "w") without an explicit encoding parameter defaults to the system's locale encoding (typically cp1252/charmap). When the crawled page contains Unicode characters like × (\xd7), which cp1252 can't encode, Python raises:

'charmap' codec can't encode character '\xd7' in position 13795