Re: Sphinx parallel build error: UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode characters in position 18-20: ordinal not in range(256)

["Michal Suchánek" <msuchanek@suse.de>]

On Thu, May 06, 2021 at 07:53:25PM +0200, Markus Heiser wrote:
> Am 06.05.21 um 19:27 schrieb Mauro Carvalho Chehab:
> > Em Thu, 6 May 2021 19:04:44 +0200
> > Markus Heiser <markus.heiser@darmarit.de> escreveu:
> > 
> > > Am 06.05.21 um 18:46 schrieb Mauro Carvalho Chehab:
> > > > Em Thu, 6 May 2021 17:57:15 +0200
> > > > Markus Heiser <markus.heiser@darmarit.de> escreveu:
> > > > > Am 06.05.21 um 12:39 schrieb Michal Suchánek:
> > > > > > When building HTML documentation I get this output:
> > > > > ...
> > > > > > [  412s] UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode characters in position 18-20: ordinal not in range(256)
> > > > > ...
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > It does not say which input file contains the offending character so I can't tell which file is broken.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Any idea how to debug?
> > > > > 
> > > > > I guess the build host is a very simple container, what does
> > > > > 
> > > > >      echo $LC_ALL
> > > > >      echo $LANG
> > > > > 
> > > > > prompt?  If it is latin, change it to something using utf-8 (I recommend
> > > > > 'en_US.utf8').
> > > > > 
> > > > > A UnicodeEncodeError can occour everywhere where characters are
> > > > > encoded from (internal) unicode to the encoding of the stream.
> > > > > 
> > > > > By example:
> > > > > 
> > > > > A print or log statement which streams to stdout needs to encode
> > > > > from unicode to stdout's encoding.  If there is one unicode symbol
> > > > > which can not encoded to stream's encoding a UnicodeEncodeError
> > > > > is raised.
> > > > 
> > > > Hi Markus,
> > > > 
> > > > It shouldn't matter the builder's locale when building the Kernel
> > > > documentation (or any other documents built from other git trees
> > > > on other open source projects), as the Kernel's *.rpm document charset
> > > > won't change, no matter on what part of the globe it was built.
> > > > 
> > > > I vaguely remember about a change we made a couple of years ago
> > > > in order to address this issue.
> > > 
> > > Hi Mauro :)
> > > 
> > > sure? .. what if the logger wants to log some symbols from the
> > > chines translated parts to stdout and the encoding of stdout is
> > > latin?
> > > 
> > > In python the logger will raise a UnicodeEncodeError, this is
> > > what I know .. but I'm often wrong ;)
> > 
> > Yeah, Python (and almost all python apps) has a mad behavior when
> > it finds an unexpected character: instead of ignoring it, it
> 
> Hi Mauro,
> 
> it is not comfortable but is it mad? ..
> 
> Most often languages (or applications) do not handle encoding
> of strings they just piping a binary stream while python
> decode / encodes strings.
> 
> "The Zen of Python" [1] says
> 
>    Explicit is better than implicit.
> 
> If a stream can't encode symbols and these symbols should be ignored
> you have to set the encoding of the stream explicit to ignore
> such symbols.

The problem is this part never happened. Loggers are supposed to tell
you about the error in your application, not crash it.

But the problem with Sphinx may be that the output file is also assumed
to be in the locale encoding, and the output encoding is never set. It's
HTML so it could be encoded with entities, too.

The idea about handlinng encoding precisely is not mad in itself but then
everybody working with just ASCII and never testing their software works
in the cases where explicit handling is needed is the mad part. Too
US-centric culture for getting encodings right I guess.

Thanks

Michal