Bug#495272: deb822 cannot handle unicode fields

[John Wright]

repoen 495272
retitle 495272 Deb822.dump() fails when fields contain unicode objects with non-ascii characters
thanks

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 12:45:43AM +0100, Adeodato Simó wrote:
> Maybe I'm mistaken but:
> 
>   * I can't reproduce the bug with the unpatched version, using my name
>     in the Maintainer field of the .dsc file

I have run into this when I have values in Deb822 objects that are
actually unicode objects (not utf-8 encoded strings).  I'm hitting it a
lot recently, since I'm interfacing with psycopg2, which returns unicode
objects when pulling strings out of the database.

>   * the proposed fix is a no-op (and should hence be reverted), because
>     the line "# vim: fileencoding=utf-8" already does what the proposed
>     "# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-" does (see PEP 263)
>
>   * moreover, the "coding: utf-8" line does not change the default
>     encoding of python! Just the encoding on which non-ascii string
>     literals should be interpreted within that file

Yes, indeed this didn't actually change anything...

> So, could you provide a file with I could reproduce.

I've attached a script to demonstrate the issue, as well as a proposed
patch.  It adds an "encoding" argument to the Deb822Dict.dump() method.
I'm not sure if this is the right answer -- perhaps there is a better
way to write unicode objects to files, or maybe Deb822Dict should only
support already-encoded byte-strings?  For what it's worth, I'd prefer
to let it contain unicode objects as values.

-- 
John Wright <jsw at debian.org>
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