On Mar 3, 3:27 am, Philip Semanchuk <phi...@semanchuk.com> wrote: > On Mar 2, 2009, at 10:50 AM, John Machin wrote: > > > On Mar 3, 2:22 am, Philip Semanchuk <phi...@semanchuk.com> wrote: > >> See if you can successfully construct and send an email that says > >> "Hello world" in English/ASCII. If that works, change it to Arabic. > >> If > >> that works, change the email format to HTML. If that works, starts > >> pulling the content from the database. If that works, then you're > >> done. =) > > > Yuk. You are asking him to write extra speculative code when he's > > having extreme difficulty debugging the code he's already got! He's > > already said he's getting ?????? soon after the database retrieval --- > > you want him to work on the downstream problem when the upstream is > > still very muddy??? > > First of all, I preceded that paragraph with a detailed example of how > to verify that he's getting what he expects out of the database. So > no, I am not asking the OP to write extra speculative code. I'm giving > him another tool with which to work at his problem. > > He claims to have done what I asked him to do in the first place -- > break the problem into steps and verify the database steps. He says > they're working OK. I chose to take him at his word.
Rule number 1: Don't believe anything an OP says that is not corroborated by output that looks like it was produced using the repr () function (2.x) or ascii() function (3.x) Rule number 2: Don't ignore rule number 1, especially when not corroborated by any output at all. Rule number 3: [added since the Great Renaming aka the Mad Hatter's Tea Party] Ask the OP what version of Python they are using so that they can be told to use ascii() instead of repr() if using 3.X > > If he's right, then we can move on to the next step of troubleshooting > the email. If he's wrong and the problem is indeed with the database > code, then we'll eventually discover that He has *already* demonstrated, at my request, that there is a problem with, or soon after, the database extraction: """ The result of print repr(row['name']) is '??? ??????' The '?' characters are supposed to be Arabic characters. """ > and he'll have learned a > valuable lesson. It will be time-consuming and therefore painful for > him, but then he'll be more likely to remember it. > > There's more than one way to attack this problem/set of problems, yes? > > This is all kind of OT since it is about general debugging and not > about Python. The only Python-specific aspect I see is that debugging > non-ASCII problems with print is a little tricky since it introduces > yet another variable -- the terminal's encoding settings. If, for > instance, the OP's terminal is set to ISO 8859-6 or some such (I don't > know anything about encodings to handle Arabic) and he's feeding it > UTF-8, then ??????? might indeed be the result. and that is the rationale for Rule #1 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
