[Slackbuilds-users] Bad character in snappy.info

[Ruben Schuller]

hi,

2021-06-09 Erich Ritz via SlackBuilds-users
<slackbuilds-users at slackbuilds.org>:

> On Wednesday, June 9th, 2021 at 5:55 AM, Didier Spaier
> <didier at slint.fr> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > Which leads to a request. In http://slackbuilds.org/guidelines/ it
> > is written:
> >
> > "It's recommended to use plain ASCII for all files that are being
> > submitted to
> > SBo"
> >
> > However, most languages use characters outside of the ASCII set.
> > Why not allow
> > an UTF-8 encoding, in which all maintainers names can be properly
> > written?
> >
> > Didier
> >  
> 
> With Slackware 15.0 switching to a UTF-8 locale by default:
> 
> Tue Jul 12 03:48:34 UTC 2016
> a/etc-14.2-x86_64-8.txz: Rebuilt.
>        In /etc/profile.d/lang.{csh,sh}.new, make en_US.UTF-8 the
> default locale.
> 
> I agree I would like to see all files as being encoded in UTF-8.

seconded.

> However, in the case of snappy.info it needs to be converted:
> 
> $ file snappy.info
> snappy.info: ISO-8859 text
> 
> I think this is why python is choking on it.  Indeed, the webview
> also can't correctly show the file:
> https://git.slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/tree/development/snappy/snappy.info?h=14.2
> But using vim locally vim correctly detects the file encoding and
> displays properly.

my experience with python is that it's horrible to deal with encodings
in it. python3 isn't better, it just has different modes of failing.
converting everything to UTF-8 would help with that as that seems to be
the default encoding in python3, at least from what i've read. one 
still needs to guard any place with exception handling where another
encoding _might_ be used.

cheers
ruben