The Claude Desktop client will hang in Windows when utilizing extended/multibyte characters in sqlite as a result of decoding errors. The decoding errors are resolved by using UTF-8 encoding.
Configuring Windows to use UTF-8 in place of windows-1252 makes the default server behavior consistent with macOS.
os.environ PYTHONIOENCODING is checked as to not interfere with an environment override, such as:
{
"mcpServers": {
"sqlite": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": [
"mcp-server-sqlite", "--db-path", "./example.db"
],
"env": {
"PYTHONIOENCODING": "utf-8"
}
}
}
}
