NLTK import error - windows

Question

I'm new to Python and NLTK. I've been trying to find a solution to my problem but have not found one yet and was hoping someone could help me.
I'm currently running 64bit Windows 8. I've followed the instruction in the NLTK website (http://www.nltk.org/install.html). I might have installed a 64bit version Python in the first place but have removed it and reinstall 32bit version Python. Now I'm having the following problem:
Python 2.7.9 (default, Dec 10 2014, 12:24:55) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
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>>> import nltk
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#0>", line 1, in <module>
import nltk
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\nltk\__init__.py", line 117, in <module>
from nltk.align import *
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\nltk\align\__init__.py", line 15, in <module>
from nltk.align.ibm1 import IBMModel1
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\nltk\align\ibm1.py", line 18, in <module>
from nltk.corpus import comtrans
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\nltk\corpus\__init__.py", line 64, in <module>
from nltk.tokenize import RegexpTokenizer
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\nltk\tokenize\__init__.py", line 62, in <module>
from nltk.data import load
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\nltk\data.py", line 74, in <module>
if os.path.expanduser('~/') != '~/':
File "C:\Python27\lib\ntpath.py", line 310, in expanduser
return userhome + path[i:]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xac in position 9: ordinal not in range(128)
>>>
Any ideas?

Answer 1

I solve this by changing my operating system locale for non-Unicode programs:
1 – Go to Control Panel
2 – Click “Clock, Language and Region”
3 – Click “Regional and Language Options”
4 – Go under “Administrative” tab
5 – current system locale (for non-Unicode) is displayed, to change it click “Change system locale”
6 – Then just choose English! After a reboot, done!