[Aspell-user] aspell-<LANG>: Invalid UTF-8 sequence at position...

[Martin Swift]

Dear aspell community,

For a while, now, I've been unable to properly install the Icelandic
and German aspell libraries. I get a torrent of warnings similar to:
  Warning: The string "Grímseyjar" is invalid. Invalid UTF-8 sequence at 
position 3. Skipping string.
  Warning: The string "Grímsson" is invalid. Invalid UTF-8 sequence at position 
3. Skipping string.
  Warning: The string "Grímssonar" is invalid. Invalid UTF-8 sequence at 
position 3. Skipping string.
  Warning: The string "Grímssyni" is invalid. Invalid UTF-8 sequence at 
position 3. Skipping string.

It seems that the problem arises in every string that contains a
non-ascii character. For languages such as those mentioned which
contain a lot of such characters, the resulting library is pretty much
useless.

A while ago, I tried everything I could think of. Grabbed the source
files and converted some in different directions with iconv but
without luck. Eventually, I gave up figuring that my spelling wasn't
*that* bad. Some time later, I've found nothing on this and the Gentoo
community doesn't seem to recognize where the issue may lie.

The archives for this list also seem rather silent so I wanted to see
if anyone had any advice to offer as to what I could try to do to fix
the problem, or at least diagnose it. If not, well then at least it's
here for the next one looking...

Thanks,
Martin

$ aspell --version
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.4)

$ locale
LANG=is_IS.utf8
LC_CTYPE="is_IS.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="is_IS.utf8"
LC_TIME="is_IS.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="is_IS.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="is_IS.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.utf8
LC_PAPER="is_IS.utf8"
LC_NAME="is_IS.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="is_IS.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="is_IS.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="is_IS.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="is_IS.utf8"
LC_ALL=

$ grep UTF /etc/locale.gen
en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
is_IS.UTF-8 UTF-8
de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8
ja_JP.UTF-8 UTF-8

PS. I first sent this without subscribing, and got a message saying
that my email was being held for review before approval. Now, ten days
later, there has been no responce, positive or negative. If no-one is
monitoring this, that message should really be changed.

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\u270C