ikiwiki/doc/bugs/proxy.py_utf8_troubles.mdwn

when writing an external plugin using `proxy.py`, the getstate and setstate
functions don't accept unicode data:

    uncaught exception: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4' in position 25: ordinal not in range(128)
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "proxy.py", line 309, in run
        self._in_fd, self._out_fd)
      File "proxy.py", line 192, in handle_rpc
        ret = self._dispatcher.dispatch(method, params)
      File "proxy.py", line 84, in dispatch
        return self._dispatch(method, params)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/SimpleXMLRPCServer.py", line 420, in _dispatch
        return func(*params)
      File "proxy.py", line 251, in hook_proxy
        ret = function(self, *args)
      File "/home/chrysn/git/ikiwiki-plugins//plugins/my_plugin", line 49, in data2html
        proxy.setstate(kwargs['page'], 'meta', 'title', unicode_containing_umlauts)
      File "proxy.py", line 291, in setstate
        return self.rpc('setstate', page, id, key, value)
      File "proxy.py", line 233, in rpc
        *args, **kwargs)
      File "proxy.py", line 178, in send_rpc
        cmd, data))
    UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4' in position 25: ordinal not in range(128)

the culprit is the last `_debug_fn` invocation in `send_rpc` (line 178), where
unicode data is format-fed into a string. while this could be circumvented by
making the formatting string a unicode string, that would cause trouble with
python3 and we'd just move the problem to the stderr writing later on; instead,
"`cmd, data))`" should become "`cmd, repr(data)))`" and everything is fine.
debug output doesn't look that pretty any more, but is safe.

--[[chrysn]]

> ok, [[done]] --[[Joey]]