[sx1freak]

Hi,

when I want to import a VCard with German umlauts with this code

import contacts

vcardstring=u"""
BEGIN:VCARD
CLASS:PUBLIC
FN:öäüÖÄÜ
REV:2005-09-23T16:05:40Z
UID:uTPLCgYuJe
VERSION:3.0
END:VCARD"""

contactdb = contacts.open()
print vcardstring.encode('iso-8859-1','replace')
contactdb.import_vcards(vcardstring.encode('iso-8859-1','replace'))

I get this error:

BEGIN:VCARD
CLASS:PUBLIC
FN:öäüÖÄÜ
REV:2005-09-23T16:05:40Z
UID:uTPLCgYuJe
VERSION:3.0
END:VCARD

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "E:\System\Apps\Python\my\syncandrunclient.py", line 156, in run
    execfile(target, g)
  File "e:\python\vcardtest.py", line 15, in ?
    TEL;TYPE=WORK:5678
  File "E:\system\libs\contacts.py", line 157, in import_vcards
    return [self[x] for x in self._db.import_vcards(unicode(vcards),vcard_flags)]
UnicodeError: ASCII decoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

Please give me a hint where my error lies! I really need this...
Thanks for your time & bye,

Joost

[simo.salminen]

The code inside contacts.py only supports pure ascii strings.

Workaround: call the importing code manually. Take a look at contacts.py, and make similar call, only remove the unicode(vcards) stuff. Then pass vcards unicode string.

Or, if you insist on using the call, you have to use u"something".encode("ascii", "replace"). Then you will loose the special characters.

[sx1freak]

Hi,
thanks for your reply! To be honest, I'm quite surprised I can only import ascii-charcters in an easy way, that seems not to be very useful for many many users out there...I really hope this restriction gets lifted at some point.

Back to your suggestion: wouldn't it be possible then to edit contacts.py directly and remove the unicode()?

Bye,

Joost

[simo.salminen]

Sure it is. But you don't have to do that. Just copy/paste the routine code from contacts.py, and do the call in your code. That's cleaner than modifying librarys.

so your code looks like: contactsdb._db.import_vcards(..)

[sx1freak]

Whooo, thanks!
I just tried the in-place replacement, and it works! Thanks a lot!
Now I'm going to try the replacement in my code, as you suggested.
Cool!

Bye, Joost

PS: I still cannot see why there is something in the code which (as far as I can see) deliberately disables important functionality...