On 1/31/23 09:48, Ivan Krylov wrote:
Can we use the "bytes" encoding for such environment variables invalid
in the current locale? The following patch preserves CE_NATIVE for
strings valid in the current UTF-8 or multibyte locale (or
non-multibyte strings) but sets CE_BYTES for those that are invalid:

Index: src/main/sysutils.c
===================================================================
--- src/main/sysutils.c (revision 83731)
+++ src/main/sysutils.c (working copy)
@@ -393,8 +393,16 @@
        char **e;
        for (i = 0, e = environ; *e != NULL; i++, e++);
        PROTECT(ans = allocVector(STRSXP, i));
-       for (i = 0, e = environ; *e != NULL; i++, e++)
-           SET_STRING_ELT(ans, i, mkChar(*e));
+       for (i = 0, e = environ; *e != NULL; i++, e++) {
+           cetype_t enc = known_to_be_latin1 ? CE_LATIN1 :
+               known_to_be_utf8 ? CE_UTF8 :
+               CE_NATIVE;
+           if (
+               (utf8locale && !utf8Valid(*e))
+               || (mbcslocale && !mbcsValid(*e))
+           ) enc = CE_BYTES;
+           SET_STRING_ELT(ans, i, mkCharCE(*e, enc));
+       }
  #endif
      } else {
        PROTECT(ans = allocVector(STRSXP, i));
@@ -416,11 +424,14 @@
            if (s == NULL)
                SET_STRING_ELT(ans, j, STRING_ELT(CADR(args), 0));
            else {
-               SEXP tmp;
-               if(known_to_be_latin1) tmp = mkCharCE(s, CE_LATIN1);
-               else if(known_to_be_utf8) tmp = mkCharCE(s, CE_UTF8);
-               else tmp = mkChar(s);
-               SET_STRING_ELT(ans, j, tmp);
+               cetype_t enc = known_to_be_latin1 ? CE_LATIN1 :
+                   known_to_be_utf8 ? CE_UTF8 :
+                   CE_NATIVE;
+               if (
+                   (utf8locale && !utf8Valid(s))
+                   || (mbcslocale && !mbcsValid(s))
+               ) enc = CE_BYTES;
+               SET_STRING_ELT(ans, j, mkCharCE(s, enc));
            }
  #endif
        }

Here are the potential problems with this approach:

  * I don't know whether known_to_be_utf8 can disagree with utf8locale.
    known_to_be_utf8 was the original condition for setting CE_UTF8 on
    the string. I also need to detect non-UTF-8 multibyte locales, so
    I'm checking for utf8locale and mbcslocale. Perhaps I should be more
    careful and test for (enc == CE_UTF8) || (utf8locale && enc ==
    CE_NATIVE) instead of just utf8locale.

  * I have verified that Sys.getenv() doesn't crash with UTF-8-invalid
    strings in the environment with this patch applied, but now
    print.Dlist does, because formatDL wants to compute the width of the
    string which has the 'bytes' encoding. If this is a good way to
    solve the problem, I can work on suggesting a fix for formatDL to
    avoid the error.

Thanks, indeed, type instability is a big problem of the approach "turn invalid strings to bytes". It is something what is historically being done in regular expression operations, but it is brittle and not user friendly: writing code to be agnostic to whether we are dealing with "bytes" or a regular string is very tedious. Pieces of type instability come also from that ASCII strings are always flagged "native" (never "bytes"). Last year I had to revert a big change which broke existing code by introducing some more of this instability due to better dealing with invalid strings in regular expressions. I've made some additions to R-devel allowing to better deal with such instability but it is still a pain and existing code has to be changed (and made more complicated).

So, I don't think this is the way to go.

Tomas




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