problem: non-ascii data and xmlrpmlib.py

Hi everybody!

First I'd like to thank the responsibles for opensourcing the OGO-system.
Second I'd like to thank those who are on the front line, like Helge,
for their strong and ongoing support, always in a timely and constructive
manner. So, let me bother you once more :-).

Well maybe this time you might tell me to go elsewhere with
my off-topic, python-only related noise ;-).
However, a number of attempts in trying to find out the deeper reason
or just a working implementation failed. So here are the details.

My problem seems to be in the 'xmlrpclib.py' library:
See my script 'test.py' below. Effectively it reads a specific entry
in the Person-Database and reinserts the very same data again.
The problem appears because the city of the first address associated
with my 'Test'-Person is 'São Paulo', i.e. containing an 'a' with a '~'
above - a very common Portuguese accent - thus making this record one
the repr. of which cannot be interpreted as Ascii-chars. 

Funny, but I believe that the very same situation should arise in the 
German language context on letters like ä, ö, and ü (umlaute).
However, I did not test this.

        Any hints? 

                Martin

P.S.: A similar, if not the same (don't remember exactly), error 
occured using python V.2.2 (Mandrake 9.1) - which made me upgrade to V2.3


#------------- begin script


!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# createCSV.py

import xmlrpclib, string, base64
import sys, codecs
from pprint import *

# settings
url      = "http://ogoserver/RPC2";
login    = 'root'
password = 'password'

if __name__ == '__main__':

       server = xmlrpclib.Server(url,login=login,password=password)
       query  = {
                       'qualifier' : "firstname like 'Test'",
                       'fetchLimit' : '1',
                      }
       idList = server.person.fetchIds(query)

       if idList:
               count = 1
               for idBatch in range(0,len(idList),10):
                       persons = 
server.person.getById(idList[idBatch:idBatch+10])
                       for person in persons:
                               result = server.person.update(person)

#------------ end script

The call & the crash

[shell]$ python test.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "test.py", line 32, in ?
   result = server.person.update(person)
 File "/ogo/scripts/xmlrpclib.py", line 829, in __call__
   return self.__send(self.__name, args)
 File "/ogo/scripts/xmlrpclib.py", line 992, in __request
   request = dumps(params, methodname, encoding='utf-8')
 File "/ogo/scripts/xmlrpclib.py", line 771, in dumps
   data = m.dumps(params)
 File "/ogo/scripts/xmlrpclib.py", line 458, in dumps
   result = string.join(self.__out, "")
 File "/usr/lib/python2.3/string.py", line 135, in join
   return sep.join(words)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 16: 
ordinal not in range(128)
[shell]$

#---------------- 'string.join' seems to be innocent:  the following 
script works fine:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# coding: latin-1

import string
from xmlrpclib import *

s0 = 'ascii'
s1 = u'São Paulo'
s2 = u'S\xc3\xa3o Paulo'

a = []
a.append( s0)
a.append( s1)
a.append( s2)

print string.join(a, '|')

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