Confusing error message about codec about timegaps HOT 2 CLOSED

Thanks for the feedback again.

A little background on this
Timegaps almost always needs to write something to stdout. Since stdout is a byte stream, Python needs to encode unicode data before it writes it to stdout. But which codec do we use for this? The goal is that the receiving end understands the encoded data. Python automatically determines the codec based on the value of the LC_CTYPE environment variable, but only if stdout is a tty, i.e. when stdout is displayed to the user in a terminal. If the program is not run in an interactive shell or if the output is piped to another process, the output encoding is not defined, i.e. sys.stdout.encoding is None. In this case, we (the timegaps program) can make an educated guess or leave the decision up to the user. Educated guesses with respect to encoding in my opinion, and in opinion of others, are a quite mean source of error, whereas a clear request to the user to choose the right encoding for his/her system is the only way to achieve reliability of the software itself. Relying on the user-given environment variable PYTHONIOENCODING therefore is a reasonable choice. This opinion is shared for example here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4374457/145400 and here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/6361471/145400

Your case
Now it should be clear that in your case the encoding to be used for writing to stdout was unclear to the program, because you ran timegaps non-interactively as a cron job.

The error message has nothing to do with command line argument parsing, because luckily there is a generic solution (I think) to this problem, which is implemented in timegaps. Since the error message does not mention command line arguments, I think this should not be an issue.

Since mentioning stdin in the error message confused you, we could implement two different error messages:

• If stdin is not used at all, then the error message should only say that timegaps does not know how to write data to stdout.
• If stdin is used, then the error message should say that timegaps does neither know how to read from stdin, nor does it know how to write to stdout.

Does this make sense or is it still too user unfriendly?:)

from timegaps.

Yes, that makes perfect sense, thanks!

from timegaps.