Re: [rdiff-backup-users] UnicodeEncodeError Mac OS X 10.5

[Andrew Ferguson]

On Jul 21, 2008, at 3:55 AM, Max Duessar wrote:
> I've recently been getting these errors on my local backups (to USB
> drive) on Mac OS X 10.5.4 using 1.1.16. I've upgraded to 1.1.17 and
> the problem is the same. This is the error:
>
> Exception ''ascii' codec can't encode character u'\uf022' in position
> 19: ordinal not in range(128)' raised of class '<type
> 'exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError'>':
>
> File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/rdiff_backup/eas_acls.py",
> line 153, in EA2Record
>   str_list.append('%s=0s%s' % (C.acl_quote(name), encoded_val))


Hi Max,

Thanks for your interesting error -- an extended attribute on one of  
your files has a Unicode character of 0xF022, which is well outside  
the ASCII range. Rdiff-backup is failing because the EA metadata file  
which it writes only expects ASCII characters.

At this time, I have patched rdiff-backup in CVS so that it will skip  
over such an extended attribute. The correct fix would be to make the  
EA metadata file Unicode-aware, but as that may break the file format  
and we are close to a new stable release, I have postponed such a  
change. Another advantage to postponing such a change is that we will  
soon be able to move to Python 3000, which will be released in the  
fall with full Unicode support.


best,
Andrew