utf8 problems with msgpack?

[igrigorik]

A bit of a shot in the dark, but has anyone come across problems with utf8 + msgpack? I'm using the Ruby bindings. Logged ~500 GB of data in zmpac format (stream + zlib), in ~200mb chunks (~1GB uncompressed). Trying to read the data back, and running into parse errors on random files.

Haven't had much luck tracking down the culprit so far, but if I try to sysread chunks of the file 1024 bytes at a time, and parse out the messages.. once the message is thrown, and I dump the buffer, I am seeing chinese characters, etc.

Same behavior under 1.8 and under 1.9. Any suggestions for how to recover this data, and/or any other tips?

[rb2k]

I have similar problems to_msgpack() -> redis -> MessagePack.unpack(data) leads to UTF8 errors.
I get an "invalid byte sequence in UTF-8" error after a simple decoded_data.include?("something")

It seems to happen with hashes and this is what the unpacked data looks like:
"DATE"=>", 11 Aug 2011 21:39:30 GMT\xA6SE"

(ruby 1.9.3 preview 1)

[arsduo]

Did either of you have any luck figuring this out? We're having a similar issue.

[igrigorik]

Nope, never got down to the bottom of it..

[sgtFloyd]

I ran into the same issue with to_msgpack -> redis -> MessagePack.unpack. I tracked it down to a single UTF character \xC8 (é)

Forcing ASCII-8BIT encoding before deserialization seems to fix the problem. MessagePack.unpack(data.force_encoding('ASCII-8BIT'))

[mikelaurence]

Experienced the same problem - "force_encoding" solution described by @sgtFloyd fixed it!

[trashpanda001]

The redis-rb gem forces the Redis response encoding to Encoding::default_external in Redis::Connection::CommandHelper -- this is logical, as the string is coming from an external I/O stream so it uses the default here, which in most setups is UTF-8. The normal case of setting/getting UTF-8 encoded strings in Redis works as expected.

But MessagePack is a binary serialization format, and it expects to unpack from a raw binary string, so you need to force the string you get from redis-rb into binary (or ASCII-8BIT as @sgtFloyd suggested above):

MessagePack.unpack(data.force_encoding(Encoding::BINARY))

I think the MessagePack.unpack method itself should perform this force_encoding in a future version, but for now we have to do it ourselves.

[kuenishi]

As each language implementation was separated, please open another issue at each repository if this is still problematic. Thank you.