Importing beta_code in an Anaconda environment running on a Windows system results in the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[1], line 1
----> 1 import beta_code

File ~\anaconda3\envs\CLTK-env\lib\site-packages\beta_code\__init__.py:1
----> 1 from .beta_code import greek_to_beta_code, beta_code_to_greek
      3 name = "beta_code"
...
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x8d in position 54: character maps to <undefined>

This error occurs because the JSON files are loaded using the default Windows system encoding (cp1252) instead of UTF-8. Although the JSON data files are correctly encoded in UTF-8, the code does not explicitly specify this encoding when reading the files.

To resolve this issue, modify the beta_code.py file to explicitly declare UTF-8 encoding when opening the JSON files. This change ensures the library loads correctly and prevents the UnicodeDecodeError.