Python Unicode oddness

If you have a Python string with an invalid character for the current character set, then other characters may get removed unexpectedly. For instance:

>>> a = 'FOO\xe0BAR'
>>> print '%r' % a
'FOO\xe0BAR'

>>> print '%r' % unicode(a, 'utf8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "", line 1, in 
 File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
   return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position 3-5: invalid data

Fair enough, \xe0 isn't a valid utf8 character. But if I tell the decoder to just ignore any characters it doesn't understand, it also eats the "B" and "A" characters!

>>> print '%r' % unicode(a, 'utf8', 'replace')
u'FOO\ufffdR'
>>> print '%r' % unicode(a, 'utf8', 'ignore')
u'FOOR'

That was unexpected. One day I'm sure someone will explain why it happens to me.

Making it easier to maintain JIRA workflows

This is one for JIRA admins.

I've had to track down a few problems recently that were related to fields not appearing on screens, especially when issues were changing their status. The cause turned out to be customized Transition Screens. A Transition Screen is the screen that is shown while you are moving from one status to another, and it's easy to forget which screen goes with each transition.

Sure, you can click on each transition and look for which screen is being used, or you can look at the list of screens and see which transitions used each screen. However, as the number of transitions and screens begins to grow, workflows become harder to maintain. The precision hack shown here helps with this. Click on the image to enlarge and look at the "Transitions" column. Each line has had the text "with the screen "added.




When you view any JIRA workflow with the "View Workflow Steps" screen, the transitions between steps (statuses) now have their screen information shown as well. At a glance, you can now look at a single workflow and see which of your transitions have those troublesome custom transition screens.

The file to change is

atlassian-jira/secure/admin/views/workflow/viewworkflowsteps.jsp

and the modified version can be found here. This was tested with JIRA 3.13.2 and is also a good example of what you can do with JSP if you have to.