`UnicodeDecodeError` ?

[rknLA]

Hey, I'm trying to run this on Mac OS 10.11.4 from source, and not sure that I'm doing things correctly. I'm also running into an exception that terminates the program.

I've installed portaudio using brew install portaudio, which has let me run pip install pyaudio successfully, and I'm running the script using python Oe2sSLE_GUI.py.

At first, I clicked on Open, and navigated to the e2sSample.all file, thinking that that was the thing that I was supposed to open, selected it, then clicked on Import e2sSample.all, which seemed more likely to be the feature that I was actually looking for. Then I got the following exception log in my terminal:

(venv)rkn-mm:Oe2sSLE(master?) $ python Oe2sSLE_GUI.py                                                                                   28.03.2016 [16:43:46]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "Oe2sSLE_GUI.py", line 2112, in <module>
    app.mainloop()
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python3/3.5.1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python3.5/tkinter/__init__.py", line 1131, in mainloop
    self.tk.mainloop(n)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x8f in position 0: invalid start byte

I've tried running the program again, and just clicking directly on Import e2sSample.all, but then I got a black window that didn't really allow me to do anything else, so I closed out of it.

Then, I've run it again, and just scrolled around and I see a similar exception/exit:

(venv)rkn-mm:Oe2sSLE(master?) $ python Oe2sSLE_GUI.py                                                                                       28.03.2016 [16:47:02]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "Oe2sSLE_GUI.py", line 2112, in <module>
    app.mainloop()
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python3/3.5.1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python3.5/tkinter/__init__.py", line 1131, in mainloop
    self.tk.mainloop(n)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc7 in position 0: invalid continuation byte

Any ideas about how to fix this, or in general, how to get this up and working?

[rknLA]

It looks like I get either an invalid start byte or invalid continuation byte any time I inadvertently scroll up past the top of the text, whether it's in the main view, or in the About text view.

[JonathanTaquet]

Hello, thank you for your report.

I do not have a Mac, so it is difficult for me to test this code on MacOS.

It seems that you were doing correctly. I identified 2 issues related to you comment:

• the first one is the fact that the Open/Import functions were not working
• the second one is the fact that mouse scroll makes the application crash

I performed two commits:

• the first one bb0e376 is fixing an issue on MacOs X (and probably on Linux x64: I do not have checked that application is working on linux yet). I use struct module to load and save binary data. I was not familiar with this and assumed that unsigned long int ('L' format string) were 32bits (as on windows, and as indicated in the python struct documentation). But reading in more details the documentation, it says that "By default, C types are represented in the machine’s native format and byte order, and properly aligned by skipping pad bytes if necessary (according to the rules used by the C compiler).". And on Linux x64, and it seems as well as on MacOs X, C type unsigned long int are 64bits. So, I replaced unsigned long int by int ('I' format string) to have 32bits values. It would solve the first issue.
• the second one 3c873cb is temporarily disabling the possibility to use mouse scroll on MacOS. It would solve the second issue. I'll try to investigate and I'll restore the mouse scrolling when I'll have found a solution. But until then the application should be usable now on MacOS

[rknLA]

Thanks for these fixes. I'm able to run the app successfully without the crashes now, but I'm running into another issue now, and that's that the window just goes mostly black (except for the corners) after I attempt to load a .all file.. Nothing shows up in the terminal, so I'm not sure what to do to attempt to debug this further

[rknLA]

It's possible that this issue is what's mentioned on the python page for tkinter

Particularly:

If you are using OS X 10.9 Mavericks and a Python from a python.org 64-bit/32-bit installer, application windows may not update properly due to a Tk problem.

[rknLA]

Well, installing 8.5.18.0 didn't solve the problem, nor did installing 8.6, and the whole thing is crashing when I try to set a breakpoint inside of a UI handler. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if I know enough about tkinter to know where else to look on this one.

[rknLA]

Adding a sample .all file here so that I can point to it when I ask a question about this on Stack Overflow.

e2sSample.all.zip

[JonathanTaquet]

I think I have found the problem of the black screen. I realized that I had the same problem as you when using your file (but not using the ones I generated myself). There was a problem with character encoding of the sample name. Check commit 99a3e1a3e270e6f9034bb38ad2f7da895bc541f7 that should fix it.

[JonathanTaquet]

The mouse scroll seems to work properly, now. I restored it.

[JonathanTaquet]

The Unicode Decode Error issue is still present on some versions of MacOS when scrolling with mouse. A solution is as you pointed out, and as also detailed here: https://www.python.org/download/mac/tcltk/ to install ActiveTcl 8.5.18.0, and an official release of python (version 3.5.3 for instance) that is linking to this version of tcl/tk.