* Census DEA - accent characters error?

[sbell95]

I have just begun to encounter the following error after running Helen's DEA 'Record Census Data (UK)' v1.4:

Screenshot 2021-10-09 155057.jpg (18.07 KiB) Viewed 1645 times

This is despite not having any characters out of the ordinary in any of my text fields?

Screenshot 2021-10-09 155115.jpg (54.05 KiB) Viewed 1645 times

I also note that this error does not seem to be able to be repeated in the sample project... but doesn't seem to otherwise cause any issues in my main project as the plugin still runs and functions as expected.

Any ideas?

[tatewise]

This is related to handling the innumerable UTF-8 multi-byte Unicode characters beyond the one byte ANSI characters.
That includes not only accented foreign language characters but all Asian characters and unusual symbols.

Plugins should be designed to handle all UTF-8 Unicode characters.
However, the 'Record Census Data (UK)' and related DEA have their File > Encoding set to ANSI and not UTF-8.
So if there is nothing in the Plugin script to counter that, then the warning you are seeing is automatically produced regardless of whether any Unicode characters are actually processed or not.
If you were to add some accented foreign language characters to your data then they would probably get mishandled.

I am surprised the warning does not occur in the Sample Project as it should be the same for all Projects.

[ColeValleyGirl]

I'm surprised -- I'm not seeing that behaviour.

The DEAs all invoke setIupDefaults from the fhUtils library, which sets string encoding to UTF8.

Code: Select all

local function setIupDefaults()
	local function getRegKey(key)
		local sh = luacom.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
		local ans
		if pcall(function()
			ans = sh:RegRead(key)
		end) then
			return ans
		else
			return nil, true
		end
	end
	iup.SetGlobal("CUSTOMQUITMESSAGE", "YES")
	-- Get Font and size from the Registry for the property box and use as the default font.
	local v
	-- Check for preview value and use if existing
	v = getRegKey("HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Calico Pie\\Family Historian 7 Beta\\2.0\\Preferences\\PDX Font")
	if not v then
		v = getRegKey("HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Calico Pie\\Family Historian\\2.0\\Preferences\\PDX Font")
	end
	local t = { stringx.splitv(v, ",") } -- first value is size and 14th is font name
	iup.SetGlobal("DEFAULTFONT", t[14] .. " " .. t[1] / 20)
	iup.SetGlobal("UTF8MODE", "YES")
	iup.SetGlobal("UTF8MODE_FILE", "NO") --use file names in the current locale
	fhSetStringEncoding("UTF-8")
end

Sarah, what encoding is your project saved in (Tools > Preferences > File Load/Save > File Saving Options)? Is it UTF8 (default) or UTF16?

Updated to add: changing save enconding to utf16 doesn't make any difference -- I still can't reproduce the error.

[ColeValleyGirl]

This was fixed in the most recent release of the DEA.

P.S. Mike, it was nothing to do with the DEA encoding.