apport-cli, apport-kde crashed with UnicodeEncodeError in many places

[Rex Tsai]

apport does not manage stdio/stdout encoding correctly, it crashed if there is non ascii charsets. Users can not submit issue in many locales, need to switch LANGUAGE to en_US.

ProblemType: Crash
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: apport 1.21.2-0ubuntu14
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-8.11-generic 3.0.1
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-8-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Aug 16 11:45:00 2011
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/apport-cli
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110426)
InterpreterPath: /usr/bin/python2.7
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcCmdline: /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/apport-cli /var/crash/_usr_lib_ibus-chewing_ibus-engine-chewing.1000.crash
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
 LANGUAGE=zh_TW:zh
PythonArgs: ['/usr/bin/apport-cli', '/var/crash/_usr_lib_ibus-chewing_ibus-engine-chewing.1000.crash']
SourcePackage: apport
Title: apport-cli crashed with UnicodeEncodeError in communicate(): 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 40-42: ordinal not in range(128)
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout libvirtd lpadmin plugdev sambashare vboxusers

[Rex Tsai (chihchun)]

By default, the python 2.7 on Ubuntu/Debian is using ascii as default encoding. There is an option in /usr/lib/python2.7/site.py, user can enable to support locale aware default string encodings, which is a system wide setting.

The better approach is to switch the default encoding to user's setting. Like

import locale
encoding = 'ascii'
loc = locale.getdefaultlocale()
if loc[1]:
    encoding = loc[1]

sys.setdefaultencoding(encoding)

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Thanks for your report. Settign to 'Triaged' since it contains enough information and there is a duplicate.

[Julian Taylor (jtaylor)]

setdefaultencoding is disabled in site.py for a reason (and is removed in python3):
http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2005/08/02/0
http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/2008/01/08/syssetdefaultencoding-is-evil/

its better to properly fix your application, e.g. this fails:
python -c 'print u"\u03A9"' | cat
...
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u03a9'

this works:
python -c 'print u"\u03A9".encode("UTF-8")' | cat
Ω

[Rex Tsai (chihchun)]

Dmitry, please upload the crashed backtrace of your issue, but not just change the bug summary. Thanks

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for apport (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]