Lorenzo Ennoggi just encountered an issue with simfactory where it fails with an utf-8 decoding error due to an invalid utf-8 character in Cactus' output stream in simfactory/lib/simrestart.py line 1016:

out_txt = out_read.read()

then can probably be avoided by ensuring that we read and write "byte" objects (and use binary file IO) rather than "strings".

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2544/utf-8-decode-failure-when-using-create-run