What does the MySQL error "Unhandled exception: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)" mean?

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This MySQL error message means that the ASCII codec being used is unable to decode the character at position 0 which has a hexadecimal value of "0xef". This character is not within the range of the ASCII character set, which only contains characters with hexadecimal values between 0x00 and 0x7F. The error message indicates that the character encoding being used is not configured to handle non-ASCII characters, causing this decoding error.