Malformed UTF-8 character

[brobr]

Hi, when I try to compile gri on a recent slackware64-current it fails with this error during compilation:

utf8 "\xF3" does not map to Unicode at /usr/share/texinfo/Texinfo/ParserNonXS.pm line 1796, line 19280.

Malformed UTF-8 character: \xf3\x70\x65\x7a (unexpected non-continuation byte 0x70, immediately after start byte 0xf3; need 4 bytes, got 1) in pattern match (m//) at /usr/share/texinfo/Texinfo/ParserNonXS.pm line 3364.
Malformed UTF-8 character (fatal) at /usr/share/texinfo/Texinfo/ParserNonXS.pm

On this system we have now:
texinfo-6.7-x86_64-1

the error is in this function-call

# This combines several regular expressions used in '_parse_texi' to
# look at what is next on the remaining part of the line.
# NOTE - this sub has an XS override
sub parse_texi_regex {
my ($line) = @;

my ($at_command, $open_brace, $asterisk, $single_letter_command,
$separator_match, $misc_text)
= ($line =~ /^@([[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]-]*)
|^({)
|^(*)
|^@(["'~@&}{,.!? \t\n*-^`=:|/\])
|^([{}@,:\t.\f])
|^([^{}@,:\t.\n\f]+)
/x);

if ($open_brace) {
$separator_match = $open_brace;
} elsif ($asterisk) {
($misc_text) = ($line =~ /^([^{}@,:\t.\n\f]+)/);
}

return ($at_command, $open_brace, $asterisk, $single_letter_command,
$separator_match, $misc_text);
}

Would this be a gri or a texinfo problem?

(I have also sent this to bug-texinfo@gnu.org)

[dankelley]

My guess is that it's a texinfo problem, since the gri code has not changed in a long while, and has been building cleanly for years. As I recall, there have been some changes in the tex system within linux over the past year or two, but I do not have a linux box so I'm not clear on the details.

[brobr]

Hi,

I got this answer from texinfo (Gavin Smith)

It is because Texinfo 6.7 changed the default input encoding to UTF-8
and the input is in ISO-8859-1. The easiest way to fix this would be to
convert the input file to UTF-8, but you could also add
"@documentencoding ISO-8859-1" to the file.

Where or how do I set this for the gri-source? (I can then submit a patchfile with the source that would enable the build)

[dankelley]

My guess is that this ought to go into doc/gri.texi but I don't know of any rules as to where things go. Perhaps near the top. I no longer have a linux machine on which to test such things.

[brobr]

Ok with the "@documentencoding ISO-8859-1" pasted at the top of doc/gri.texi file I got the program compiled.

Thanks for the advise.

BTW independently they came up with a patch at linux.questions as well, see:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/sbo-scripts-not-building-on-current-read-1st-post-pls-4175561999/page142.html#post6049595