Dictionary; some problem with data conversion

[psl]

Ubuntu 6.06 i386 desktop; Dictionary 2.14.0
Applications/Accessories/Dictionary

When I try to search word "moses" I get this error:

Error while looking up definition
Error while reading reply from server:
Invalid byte sequence in conversion input

After this error, Dictionary doesn't work anymore (it cannot find anything). I have to restart it.

I guess that this is more general problem, not only one word.

Note: the original reporter indicated the bug was in package 'gdict'; however, that package was not published in Ubuntu.

[psl (slansky)]

Maybe that this is not gdict application. It is Dictionary instaled in Ubuntu by default. Some interface to online dictionary.

[Daniel Robitaille (robitaille)]

the application is actually gnome-dictionary, installed with the package gnome-utils.

And I can reproduce this bug on my computer.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. That works fine on my edgy installation. Do you have any message on the command line when that happens with gnome-dcitionary?

[Daniel Robitaille (robitaille)]

I still get that error in edgy. It´s occuring using the gnome dictionary applet, not with the gnome-dictionary stand-alone application. It was also the applet that I tested in Dapper in my previous comment.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

I can confirm it here, no terminal messages. I forwarded the issue to the upstream bug tracker: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349396

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Upstream comment:

 Comment #5 from Emmanuele Bassi (gnome-utils developer, points: 15)
2006-08-25 11:46 UTC

currently, we can't do anything to prevent this problem: if the dictionary
server sends us badly encoded UTF-8 there is no fallback conversion available.

[psl (slansky)]

From your comment I see two separate issues:

1) dictionary has data those are not correctly UTF-8 encoded (you don't now what to do with them)

2) Gnome dictionary is confused with data those are not UTF-8 encoded and stops to work correctly. Restart needed.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could you follow upstream? they seem to argue that the bug is a server one and it might be the case

[psl (slansky)]

Sebastian,

I understand that source of the problem is at server side, it sends data those
are not in UTF encoding. This is first part of issue. Dictionary could add
support for other encodings; This is probably not easy.

The second part is why Dictionary is "demaged" by such data. It should survive
unexpected data attack, it could possibly print an error message like "sorry,
I cannot display this garbage as I don't understand this format". This is easy
from my point of view.

With regards,
Petr

------ Original Message ------
Received: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:30:15 PM CEST
From: Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: [Bug 48409] Re: Dictionary; some problem with data conversion

> could you follow upstream? they seem to argue that the bug is a server
> one and it might be the case
>
> --
> Dictionary; some problem with data conversion
> https://launchpad.net/bugs/48409
>

---------------------------------
  Petr Slansky, <email address hidden>
---------------------------------

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

This should be taken upstream and discussed there.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

I've reopened the upstream bug

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the upstream hackers consider that's not a bug in their software and closed the bug, doing the same on the ubuntu bug

[psl (slansky)]

I cannot reproduce the bug under Ubuntu 8.04 any more, I think it was fixed already.