[GRASS-dev] [GRASS GIS] #2532: TypeError: environment can only contain string when launching script on Windows

[GRASS GIS]

#2532: TypeError: environment can only contain string when launching script on
Windows
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 Reporter:  annakrat     |       Owner:  grass-dev@…              
     Type:  defect       |      Status:  new                      
 Priority:  normal       |   Milestone:  7.0.0                    
Component:  Default      |     Version:  svn-trunk                
 Keywords:  encoding     |    Platform:  MSWindows 8              
      Cpu:  Unspecified  |  
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Comment(by annakrat):

 Replying to [comment:16 glynn]:
 > Replying to [comment:15 annakrat]:
 >
 > > No, when I print the string I get xml, seems to be valid:
 > >
 > {{{
 > <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 > <!DOCTYPE task SYSTEM "C:\Users\akratoc\Programs\GRASS GIS
 7.1.svn\gui\xml\grass-interface.dtd">
 > <task name="test_workshopá.py">
 > }}}
 > > I don't understand what's wrong with it.
 >
 > The name= attribute will fail to decode due to not being valid UTF-8.
 The "á" will be encoded in cp1252 (i.e. '\xe1'); attempting to decode that
 as UTF-8 will fail (non-ASCII characters are encoded as multi-byte
 sequences; an isolated byte >= 128 can never occur in UTF-8).

 I take it that we are supporting only ascii characters in the script name.
 >
 > > > In any case, the GUI should be encoding the arguments which it
 passes to Popen(); it shouldn't be passing unicode values.
 > >
 > > Should the be encoding moved to `get_interface_description` in
 task.py?
 >
 > No. The GUI shouldn't be passing unicode values to the grass.script
 library; it should be converting them to strings itself.

 Ok.
 >
 > > The `EncodeString` function is in gui, not in python scripting
 library.
 >
 > grass.script.core has encode() and decode().
 >
 > > If I try to run the script (this time the script name is only ascii,
 but the path has some non-ascii characters which are in cp1252), I get the
 gui dialog and when I run it, I get an error:
 >
 > Ugh. I couldn't figure out what was happening here until I read the next
 sentence. It appears that str.encode() actually exists; it tries to
 convert the string to unicode (using the default encoding) so that it can
 encode it.
 >
 > > because in Popen class in
 [http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/browser/grass/trunk/gui/wxpython/core/gcmd.py#L161
 gcmd.py] some of the arguments are of type `str`, some are `unicode`. So
 if encode only the unicode ones, it starts to work.
 >
 > That makes sense. But the encoding should ideally be done at a higher
 level, at the point that wxGUI "knows" that it's dealing with a unicode
 value.

 I am not sure where the higher level is and why str and unicode are mixed
 in this case.
 >
 >
 > I'm wondering if sys.setdefaultencoding("EBCDIC-CP-BE") would work ...

 Why would it? Is it easy to test?

 Anyway, I think whatever we do, shouldn't get into the current release. I
 already fixed the important part (works with ascii path only) and I don't
 want to make things worse.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/2532#comment:17>
GRASS GIS <http://grass.osgeo.org>