UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 31448: invalid continuation byte (problem with locale ?)

[julienm116]

greetings folks :)

it's been some time since i've been having this error when starting menulibre (version 2.4.0):

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/menulibre/MenulibreApplication.py", line 1652, in do_activate
    self.win = MenulibreWindow(self, headerbar)  # type: ignore
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/menulibre/MenulibreApplication.py", line 110, in __init__
    self.bad_desktop_files = util.determine_bad_desktop_files()
                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/menulibre/util.py", line 741, in determine_bad_desktop_files
    for line in result.stderr.decode('UTF-8').split('\n'):
                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 31448: invalid continuation byte

(then hangs forever)

here are my last try's locale :

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
LC_CTYPE="C.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="C.utf8"
LC_TIME="C.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="C.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="C.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="C.utf8"
LC_PAPER="C.utf8"
LC_NAME="C.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="C.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="C.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="C.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="C.utf8"
LC_ALL=C.utf8

(note i'm in France but except for a few specific locale types, i usually use en_US.UTF-8 and no LC_ALL)

i've tried several LC_ALL value (C, C.utf8,...) but i always hit the UnicodeDecodeError with different 'codec' (whatever that may be) and i couldn't find a thread explaining what what the issue nor how to fix it

this makes me really desperate ! if someone could lend me a hand with this please i would greatly appreciate it ^^

tia,
-J.

[julienm116]

replying to myself, as this may help others like me clueless in python

here is the workaround i found while trying tinkering, i edited /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/menulibre/util.py (adapt to your install path), line 741 was : for line in result.stderr.decode('UTF-8').split('\n'): in sub-routine def determine_bad_desktop_files():
i replaced UTF-8 with ISO-8859-1 in decode argument (i guess that depending on your language you may need to adapt which encoding to use )

once this change was made application was working anew 🎉

i must have somewhere an item with specific latin-1 character that doesn't exist in UTF-8, however it shouldn't stop the application from starting (even it just displays some undef char when stumbling upon the unknown ones, imho)

there might be a better way to fix this, but ... afaic whatever works

[julienm116]

(re-opening for a while, in case someone has a better fix)