OMEdit can not open .mo file when path contains non-ASCII (e.g., Icelandic) characters

[Dietmar Winkler]

Just came across this one on Windows. When one tries to open a .mo file OMEdit simply does not do anything (also throws no error) when the file path contains non-ASCII (in this case Icelandic letters. Problem is that the way user profiles are stored on Windows the chances are quite high that they contain non-ASCII letters for people outside ASCII land.

[Francesco Casella]

As per Modelica specification, Section 13.2.2, Modelica files as stored with UTF-8 encoding.

One one hand, this should mean that any file which is created in OMEdit using an Icelandic keyboard is saved as UTF-8. @adeas31, can you confirm?

On the other hand, the question is what should OMC do with files created with any other tool or text editor. Silently ignoring the file is obviously unacceptable. I guess we have two alternatives, when a non UTF-8 file is encountered by OMC.

• simply reject the file with an error message such as "xxx.mo is not UTF-8 encoded, so it is not a valid Modelica source code file. Please convert it to UTF-8 before loading it."
• try to interpret it somehow and possibly to later overwrite it as UTF-8

The second option is apparently more user-friendly, but has a lot of ambiguity in what the final outcome is, particularly because OMEdit has no clue what the original encoding of the file was, so it could mis-interpret it.

My recommendation is to go for the first option. In this case the user has to fix the issue with, e.g., a text editor, and will know if the result is what he/she intends.

@dietmarw, would you mind attaching a sample .mo file to reproduce the issue?

@adeas31, I guess this goes beyond OMEdit and should also apply to the interactive environment, right?

[Adrian Pop]

@casella, this is about the PATH (directory) where the file is! We support UTF8 contents for the .mo files since forever.

[Francesco Casella]

All right, I've been wandering through airports for 48 hours and I'm starting to be a bit tired, sorry about that :)

I remember a similar problem was reported by some use who had cyrillic characters in the path, though I can't find it now, I need to catch my (hopefully) last plane now.

[Francesco Casella]

OK, it was Italian accented letters, not cyrillic, and I was the reporter, see #5437. It's already marked as blocker for 1.14.0