Unicode issue in utils/vt.py triggered by salt-cloud

[rbjorklin]

Description of Issue/Question

[ERROR   ] There was a query error: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2192' in position 39: ordinal not in range(128)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/salt/cloud/cli.py", line 343, in run
    ret = mapper.run_map(dmap)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/salt/cloud/__init__.py", line 2237, in run_map
    profile, local_master=local_master
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/salt/cloud/__init__.py", line 1284, in create
    output = self.clouds[func](vm_)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/salt/cloud/clouds/ec2.py", line 2760, in create
    for key, value in six.iteritems(__utils__['cloud.bootstrap'](vm_, __opts__)):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/salt/utils/cloud.py", line 566, in bootstrap
    deployed = deploy_script(**deploy_kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/salt/utils/cloud.py", line 1547, in deploy_script
    if root_cmd(deploy_command, tty, sudo, **ssh_kwargs) != 0:
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/salt/utils/cloud.py", line 2248, in root_cmd
    retcode = _exec_ssh_cmd(cmd, allow_failure=allow_failure, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/salt/utils/cloud.py", line 1809, in _exec_ssh_cmd
    stdout, stderr = proc.recv()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/salt/utils/vt.py", line 310, in recv
    return self._recv(maxsize)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/salt/utils/vt.py", line 688, in _recv
    self.stream_stdout.write(stdout)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2192' in position 39: ordinal not in range(128)

Steps to Reproduce Issue

salt-cloud -m <map-file> with ami-id: ami-436640a8

Suggested fix

Adding .encode('utf-8') to stdout in this line seems to fix the problem but might not be the correct way to fix this?

Versions Report

$ salt --versions-report
Salt Version:
           Salt: 2018.3.2
 
Dependency Versions:
           cffi: 1.6.0
       cherrypy: unknown
       dateutil: 2.6.1
      docker-py: Not Installed
          gitdb: 0.6.4
      gitpython: 1.0.1
          ioflo: Not Installed
         Jinja2: 2.7.2
        libgit2: Not Installed
        libnacl: Not Installed
       M2Crypto: 0.28.2
           Mako: Not Installed
   msgpack-pure: Not Installed
 msgpack-python: 0.5.6
   mysql-python: Not Installed
      pycparser: 2.14
       pycrypto: 2.6.1
   pycryptodome: Not Installed
         pygit2: Not Installed
         Python: 2.7.5 (default, Apr 11 2018, 07:36:10)
   python-gnupg: Not Installed
         PyYAML: 3.11
          PyZMQ: 15.3.0
           RAET: Not Installed
          smmap: 0.9.0
        timelib: Not Installed
        Tornado: 4.2.1
            ZMQ: 4.1.4
 
System Versions:
           dist: centos 7.5.1804 Core
         locale: UTF-8
        machine: x86_64
        release: 3.10.0-862.3.3.el7.x86_64
         system: Linux
        version: CentOS Linux 7.5.1804 Core

[garethgreenaway]

@rbjorklin Thanks for the report. @terminalmage Does this proposed fix look good to you? If so, @rbjorklin could put in a PR with the fix.

[terminalmage]

We would want to use salt.utils.stringutils.to_bytes(stdout) instead of manually encoding it. That way if something changes under the hood and this IS a bytestring, it doesn't fail on PY3:

>>> b'foo'.encode('utf8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'encode'

[twangboy]

Closing this issue due to age and lack of activity. Please test this on version 3006.2 and create a new issue if the problem persists. The new issue template has more information and will allow us to track and reproduce the issue more effectively. Thanks!