python 3.6 *logging modul error* UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters

On Windows 10 the logging module send this error (using scrapy)

# --- Logging error ---
...
# UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters in position 175-176: character maps to <undefined>

I have read that I should add encoding='utf-8' but I did not find how I could add it in the code below. EDIT: According to the tuto it isnt needed.

configure_logging(install_root_handler=False) #override default log settings
logging.basicConfig(
    filename='logfile.log',
    format='%(levelname)s: %(message)s',
    datefmt='%m-%d %H:%M',
    level=logging.INFO #CRITICAL ERROR WARNING  INFO    DEBUG    NOTSET 
)

I found many questions on the topics, but mostly on python 2 (or not related to the logging module). And the logging tutorial don't even talk about utf-8. (Notice that I can print UTF8 characters without any problem. The problem only occur with the logging module)

I'm not using Scrapy but I ran into the same issue with vanilla Python 3.6 logging of not being able to write UTF-8 characters via logging to a file (console worked just fine).

Based on this comment I added 'utf-8' to my FileHandler initialization. I'm configuring logging via an INI file so it looks like this:

[handler_file]
class = FileHandler
args = (r'log.txt', 'a', 'utf-8')
level = NOTSET
formatter = generic

To use logging.basicConfig() I think that you should be able to do the following:

configure_logging(install_root_handler=False) #override default log settings
logging.basicConfig(
    handlers=[logging.FileHandler('logfile.log', 'w', 'utf-8')],
    format='%(levelname)s: %(message)s',
    datefmt='%m-%d %H:%M',
    level=logging.INFO #CRITICAL ERROR WARNING  INFO    DEBUG    NOTSET 
)