Fix UnicodeDecodeError during installation on Windows: explicitly read README.md with UTF‑8 encoding

[iDhanush]

On Windows systems (e.g. CPython 3.11), pip install membase fails with:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x8f in position 1423: character maps to <undefined>

This is caused by the default open("README.md") using the system encoding (cp1252 on Windows), which breaks when encountering non-ASCII characters.

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Fix:
Change:

long_description = open("README.md").read()

to:

long_description = open("README.md", encoding="utf‑8").read()

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Impact/Rationale:

• Ensures consistent behavior across different platforms and locales
• Prevents read errors during installation
• Aligns with best practices for packaging: explicitly specifying UTF‑8 for text files ([docs.lucee.org][1], [pyopensci.org][2], [stackoverflow.com][3], [til.simonwillison.net][4])

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Verification:
Successfully tested pip install -e . and packaging on Windows with Python 3.11 without errors.

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Checklist:

• Added encoding="utf‑8" to README.md file open call
• Verified successful installation on Windows & Linux
• All existing tests pass (if applicable)