Possible SyntaxError preventing program running

[Former user]

Just gone through the install on a mac using virtualenv and python2.7.

when i try to run lsa (to confirm it has installed ok) i get the following error

(vpy27) dyn1148-168:vpy27 petergraystock$ lsa_compute Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/bin/lsa_compute", line 11, in <module> load_entry_point('lsa==1.0.2', 'console_scripts', 'lsa_compute')() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/init.py", line 484, in load_entry_point return get_distribution(dist).load_entry_point(group, name) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/init.py", line 2714, in load_entry_point return ep.load() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/init.py", line 2332, in load return self.resolve() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/init.py", line 2338, in resolve module = import(self.module_name, fromlist=['name'], level=0) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/lsa-1.0.2-py2.7-macosx-10.13-x86_64.egg/lsa/lsa_compute.py", line 38, in <module> import lsalib File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/lsa-1.0.2-py2.7-macosx-10.13-x86_64.egg/lsa/lsalib.py", line 52, in <module> import scipy.stats File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/scipy-1.2.0rc2-py2.7-macosx-10.13-x86_64.egg/scipy/stats/init.py", line 367, in <module> from .stats import * File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/scipy-1.2.0rc2-py2.7-macosx-10.13-x86_64.egg/scipy/stats/stats.py", line 173, in <module> from . import distributions File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/scipy-1.2.0rc2-py2.7-macosx-10.13-x86_64.egg/scipy/stats/distributions.py", line 13, in <module> from . import _continuous_distns File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/scipy-1.2.0rc2-py2.7-macosx-10.13-x86_64.egg/scipy/stats/_continuous_distns.py", line 3345 SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/scipy-1.2.0rc2-py2.7-macosx-10.13-x86_64.egg/scipy/stats/_continuous_distns.py on line 3346, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details

Is this due to an error from install? i have reinstalled and get the same problem. Both Scipy and numby were freshly installed (via pip) too.

Thank you for your help