Use of U+2013 (EN DASH) in trusty template causes puppetdb errors

[linuxdaemon]

Affected Puppet, Ruby, OS and module versions/distributions

• Puppet: 4.10.10
• Ruby: ruby 2.1.9p490 (2016-03-30 revision 54437) [x86_64-linux]
• Distribution: `Ubuntu Server 14.04 (Trusty)
• Module version: 2.4.1

How to reproduce (e.g Puppet code you use)

class { 'fail2ban':
  config_file_template => "fail2ban/${::lsbdistcodename}/etc/fail2ban/jail.conf.epp",
  action               => 'action_',
  whitelist            => ['127.0.0.1/8'],
}

What are you seeing

2019-01-14 22:50:21,673 ERROR [p.p.command] [251,279] [replace catalog] Retrying after attempt 0 for <node>, due to: org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: character with byte sequence 0xe2 0x80 0x93 in encoding "UTF8" has no equivalent in encoding "LATIN1"
org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: character with byte sequence 0xe2 0x80 0x93 in encoding "UTF8" has no equivalent in encoding "LATIN1"

What behaviour did you expect instead

No errors, standard run

Output log

See What are you seeing

Any additional information you'd like to impart

This error causes exported resources to not properly save and share with other nodes. I'm not 100% sure that the template file is the culprit, but it is the only file deployed containing the byte sequence puppetdb is logging. It appears that U+2018 and U+2019 (LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK and RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK respectively) cause this issue as well, and they also appear in both the trust and jessie templates

[bastelfreak]

HI @linuxdaemon, which version of puppetdb are you using? I assume this isn't the latest one. If not, is it possible that you update and check if the error is still present? This happenend alot in the 2.X or 3.X releases of PuppetDB, but got fixed afterwards.

[linuxdaemon]

Hi @bastelfreak, I'm running 4.4.0 according to puppetdb --version.

[linuxdaemon]

The exact line causing the issue is

puppet-fail2ban/templates/trusty/etc/fail2ban/jail.conf.epp

Line 265 in c9be79e

# ALERT – tried to register forbidden variable ‘GLOBALS’

confirmed by removing said line and re-running puppet on the failing node

[bastelfreak]

could you provide a patch for it?

[linuxdaemon]

I can, I'm just not sure if that is meant to be documenting a specific format for that log, containing those specific characters.

[bastelfreak]

I'm pretty sure that it should be a normal single quote like ' and it got messed up during some copy and paste.