Re: Problem with error messages

Hello,

I think, we had two issues here:
1. We have UTF-encoded translation to some language, which could contain
extended (non-letter) characters such as », — , …
and we have localized clients expecting to read the server messages in
their language using non-UTF-encoding.
I think we shouldn't leave them with the untranslated messages, instead
we just should TRANSLIT option of iconv.
For example:

>echo 'HINWEIS: Tabelle »mickeymouse« existiert nicht, wird übersprungen' | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII
HINWEIS: Tabelle iconv: illegal input sequence at position 17

But

>echo 'HINWEIS: Tabelle »mickeymouse« existiert nicht, wird übersprungen' | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII//TRANSLIT
HINWEIS: Tabelle >>mickeymouse<< existiert nicht, wird ubersprungen

Is much better and still better than to show untranslated message with
the notice about failed conversion.

2. Language of the localization could be not compatible with the client
encoding at all. For example, we can't convert Russian to LATIN1 with
TRANSLIT. In that case I would just print the original error message.

Best regards,
Alexander

20.07.2016 03:58, Peter Eisentraut пишет:
> I finally had a moment to think this through.
>
> The problem is that if an error message is not representable in the
> client encoding, all you get as a client are encoding errors. This can
> happen in any translation (or untranslated, except those generally only
> have ASCII characters).
>
> In this particular case, the German translated error messages contain
> Unicode characters not in LATIN1/LATIN9. This might have been a bad
> choice in retrospect, and can be fixed. But this same thing might also
> happen if you happen to connect to a, say, a database with locale
> ru_RU.utf8 while your client encoding is LATIN9. You will not be able
> to get any error message other than an encoding error. (Ironically, the
> backend will first try to send the encoding error in translated form,
> which will again fail, and finally it will send it in English.)
>
> I think the recovery path should be changed so that it sends the
> original error message in untranslated form, possibly preceded by a
> notice that encoding conversion failed.
>
> Comments?
>
>
> On 6/30/15 9:31 AM, Walter Willmertinger wrote:
>> We already wrote in pgsql-bugs (#11550), but there it was recommended to
>> transfer this topic to the translator team.
>>
>> Now the problem:
>> If we set client_encoding to Latin9 (as we are here in Germany), we get
>> as nearly every error message from PostgreSQL: character with byte
>> sequence 0xe2 0x80 0x9e in encoding UTF8 has no
>> equivalent in LATIN9
>>
>> Why:
>> In 9.x we have new characters for delimiting words.
>>
>> An example:
>> "Drop table if exists mickeymouse;"
>> delivers in PG-8.4
>>
>> HINWEIS: Tabelle „mickeymouse“ existiert nicht, wird übersprungen
>>
>> but delivers in PG-9.3
>>
>> HINWEIS: Tabelle »mickeymouse« existiert nicht, wird übersprungen
>>
>> If we set client_encoding to Latin9 (as we are here in Germany), we get
>> an error message from PostgreSQL:
>> character with byte sequence 0xe2 0x80 0x9e in encoding UTF8 has no
>> equivalent in LATIN9
>>
>> but we do not see the real error message: "Table ... does not exist"
>>
>> So a proposal: Please change these delimiters to something which can be
>> compiled to any foreign language, as " or similar
>>
>> Regards
>> Walter
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Viele Grüße
>>
>> Walter Willmertinger
>>
>