[cl-debian] Bug#443520: Subject: clisp: Error on startup "invalid byte #xC3 in CHARSET:ASCII conversion"

[Andreas Krüger]

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Hello, Peter,

> I think I know what causes your problem: it is caused by having a
> file in your home directory with a name that cannot be encoded with
> the locale you're trying to use.

Bingo! That was the ticket!

I had an ancient file with an ISO-8859-1 name in my $HOME. That name
contained characters illegal in ASCII and also was not legal in UTF-8.
Renaming that file solved the problem. For the record, that file name
had nothing to do whatsoever with LISP / clisp.

> It is unclear how to fix this, as it is normal that an error should
> be displayed  an easy fix it to use a locale that uses UTF8

More precisely, "to use a locale that can display all file names in
the $HOME directory". Which, in my case, was "ISO-8859-1".

> clisp stumbles across this file while searching for its
> .clisprc.lisp file in the home directory,

Weird. Why does clisp think it needs to read my entire $HOME?

As far as LISP is concerned, I'm a beginner. In other programming
languages, I would have coded a "stat" to see whether ".clisprc.lisp"
is there, and then an "open" if it is. Or else, I might have tried to
open, and handle whatever "file not there" error I might get.

Is it not straightforward to do this in LISP?


Anyway. Thank you, Peter!

Cheers, regards, warm greetings (on this sunny morning here in Germany)

Andreas
- --
andreas.krueger at famsik.de
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