[Snow-users-list] snowman-app port problems in Guile

Ludovic Courtès ludo at gnu.org
Mon Apr 14 11:36:44 EDT 2008


Hi,

"Julian Graham" <joolean at gmail.com>
writes:

> I'm having trouble using the latest version of Snowman to install
> packages -- or, well, to do very much of anything at all.  I'm using
> GNU Guile.  When run with any (valid) arguments, it produces the
> following error:
>
> ERROR: In procedure scm_lreadr:
> ERROR: #<unknown port>:19:87: illegal character in escape sequence: #\3

Running "snowman list" through `strace', I see `read(2)' calls that
receive things like this:

  (author: \"Danny Dub\\351 <Danny.Dube at ift.ulaval.ca>\")
  (author: \"Adrien Pi\\303\\251rard <pierarda at iro.umontreal.ca\")

Of course, one level of "backslashification" comes from `strace', so in
the end what we get is:

  (author: "Danny Dub\351 <Danny.Dube at ift.ulaval.ca>")
  (author: "Adrien Pi\303\251rard <pierarda at iro.umontreal.ca")

It's these escape sequences that make Guile's reader unhappy.

However, I don't understand where they come from.  When I download the
snowballs that contain these strings "by hand" from the Snow website, I
can see that they do not contain the escape sequences, but rather a
UTF-8 or Latin-1 representation of these author names.  So I suppose the
escape sequences get added somehow as the strings are sent over HTTP.

Can someone shed some light on this?

Thanks,
Ludovic.



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