[Fwd: XML export/import is cool! (Was Re: [Zope-dev] Deprecating XML export/import?)]

[Alexei Ustyuzhaninov]

Hi!

I would like to resurrect this thread with my own recent experience.
My problem was to spread a set of zodb objects over several zope
installations. Every installation required some slight modifications to
be applied to original objects (such as usernames and passwords).
So I decided to export the original data in an xml dump and write a
small application which modifies the dump as necessary before import.
But to my distress I couldn't import neither a modified dump nor even
the original dump. The process failed with UnicodeDecodeError exception.

After some investigation I realized what was the problem (at least in my
case). The xml parser extracts all texts as unicode strings. But among
them are base64-encoded strings which are decoded into non-unicode
strings containing binary data. Of course this data can't be decoded by
any codec. The code in ppml.py sometimes concatenates the raw and
unicode strings and this raises UnicodeDecodeError.

I worked this around by converting the unicode strings into non-unicode
ones. Please look at the patch attached. Zope version 2.9.4.

-- 
Best regards,
Alexei

On 25. March 2006 21:40:48 +0100 Yoshinori Okuji <yo at nexedi.com> wrote:

  > On Saturday 25 March 2006 15:56, Andreas Jung wrote:
  >> Zope 2.7 throws a BadPickleGet, 12 exception, Zope 2.8 throws
  >> BadPickleGet, 13 and Zope 2.9 raises the described UnicodeDecodeError.
  >> I don't expect that the import functionality works for even more 
complex
  >> objects. So I consider the whole functionality as totally broken. The
  >> generated XML might be useful to perform any processing outside 
Zope but
  >> using it for re-importing it into another Zope systems definitely does
  >> _not_  work. So if the functionality should remain in Zope then it
should
  >> be fixed
  >> for Zope 2.10 lately.
  >
  > Here is a quick patch for this problem (against 2.9.1). There were two
  > different problems:
  >
  > - the id attributes were not generated, because the conditional was
  > reverse.
  >
  > - unlike xmllib, expat always returns Unicode data, so simply
  > concatenating  binary values generates Unicode objects with non-ascii
  > characters.
  >


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