Working with utf8 coding to represent german characters.

[mdshane]

Very useful project and it works perfectly as long as you write your tasks in english. But since I'm German I would prefer to log my activities in German, which includes using characters like ü, ä, ö and so on. This means having the log-file in a format like utf-8. Do you have any idea on how to achieve this easily?

I tried the following up until now and don't know if I only made a mess:

When the file is created by the first hello command it is encoded with charset=us-ascii. Once I add a line using a German symbol the encoding changes to charset=iso-8859-1.

I tried to force your python scripts to work in utf-8 coding using:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
but this solves the problem only for the report-command:

when using the edit-command the file still does not display the characters correctly, even though the editor is set to utf-8 coding:
2019-01-30 13:22 hello
2019-01-30 13:23 ���

Now i can force the file to be charset=utf-8 using the command line and then the problem is fixed in the editor of course:
2019-01-30 13:22 hello
2019-01-30 13:23 äöü
but then the report-command is messed up again:

If you have any ideas for an easy solution I would be very happy and I believe other people from all over the world might be interested to simply change the coding maybe in the .config file, to cope with different language-specific characters.
Thanks in advance!

[larose]

I think this is only an issue with Python 2, did you try with Python 3?

[mdshane]

I am working indeed working with Python 3 and I know, that the default setting for Python 3 is utf-8 meaning this should not be a problem. Still I have it.

[larose]

Sorry for the slow response. I just tried to reproduce your issue but I couldn't:

$ rm ~/.local/share/utt/utt.log 
$ utt hello
$ file ~/.local/share/utt/utt.log 
/home/mathieu/.local/share/utt/utt.log: ASCII text
$ utt add "ü, ä, ö"
$ file ~/.local/share/utt/utt.log 
/home/mathieu/.local/share/utt/utt.log: UTF-8 Unicode text
$ utt report

------------------------ Sunday, Mar 10, 2019 (week 10) ------------------------

Working Time: 0h02 (0h01 + 0h01) [0h02]
Break   Time: 0h00 [0h00]

----------------------------------- Projects -----------------------------------

(0h02) : -- Current Activity --, ü, ä, ö

---------------------------------- Activities ----------------------------------

(0h01) : -- Current Activity --
(0h01) : ü, ä, ö


----------------------------------- Details ------------------------------------

(0h01) 08:48-08:49 ü, ä, ö
(0h01) 08:49-08:50 -- Current Activity --

Perhaps it's an issue with your shell?