Handle non-ascii chars in bbdb

[bergey]

bbdb / emacs has a rather wacky way of representing non-ASCII characters.

ASynck, encountering them, throws errors on the command line like:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xed' in position 53: ordinal not in range(128)

The debugger shows that python is calling str(e), where e is:

BBDBParseError(u'Could not Parse BBDB contact entry: ["D Jared" #("Dom\xednguez" 0 9 (charset iso-8859-1)) nil nil nil nil ("danjared@mit.edu") ((creation-date . "2011-10-31") (timestamp . "2011-10-31")) nil]',)

Here are some more bbdb lines that produce the same error:
[#("Héctor" 0 6 (charset iso-8859-1)) "Tarrido-Picart" nil nil nil nil ("http1917@gmail.com") ((creation-date . "2011-12-14") (timestamp . "2011-12-14")) nil]
[#("severiano alberto vélez" 0 23 (charset iso-8859-1)) #("gómez" 0 5 (charset iso-8859-1)) nil nil nil nil ("sevevelez@hotmail.com") ((creation-date . "2011-12-14") (timestamp . "2011-12-14")) nil]
[#("王洋" 0 2 (charset chinese-gb2312)) "" nil nil nil nil ("wanghongyang1767@gmail.com") ((creation-date . "2011-10-06") (timestamp . "2011-10-06")) nil]
[#("박준원" 0 3 (charset korean-ksc5601)) "" nil nil nil nil ("flowrime@naver.com") ((creation-date . "2011-10-06") (timestamp . "2011-10-06")) nil]

If this issue is still open in a month, I'll dig deeper, but I don't have time now.

[skarra]

If I strip out all the funky text encoding and just retain the unicode strings (within quotes) as I see them in your description above, ASynK is able to parse the file properly using utf-8.

Are you using some old version of Emacs? I am not even sure how to get Emacs to dump such encoded strings. I would wager that if you "convert" your bbdb file in Emacs to a more "modern" utf-8 encoded file you should be able to use it with ASynK today.

But then, it is also desirable to get ASynK to be able to detect and deal with such cases. So patches are welcome.

[bergey]

I'm using emacs 23.4 and bbdb 2.36 (current Debian unstable). I'd much rather get bbdb to use UTF-8 than get ASynk to support the horrible old multiple-encodings format. So I'll look into that. Thanks for the quick repsonse!

[skarra]

Great; I'll close this issue now.