Beets is haunted, reads info from comment lines?

[RollingStar]

Problem

A lot is going on here. May be many bugs combining? Some thoughts:

• Beets reading info to the right of a comment indicator # which is unintuitive
• Information in replace somehow ruining musicbrainz.host
• Maybe something to do with using git branch rather than latest stable (1.4.3)?
• Maybe something to do with latest commit?

Running this command in verbose (-vv) mode:

beet -vv
configuration error: musicbrainz.host not found

Setup

• OS: win10 x64
• Python version: 3.6
• beets version: Latest git (9840964)
• Turning off plugins made problem go away (yes/no): no

My configuration (output of beet config) is:

Causes issue:

library: e:\songs\beetslibrary.bib

replace:
    'qqqqqqq': 'eeeeeeeee'
    #”

Works fine:

library: e:\songs\beetslibrary.bib

replace:
    'qqqqqqq': 'eeeeeeeee'
    #

[sampsyo]

Hmm; that's odd—this one I can't seem to reproduce.

$ cat config.yaml
library: e:\songs\beetslibrary.bib

replace:
    'qqqqqqq': 'eeeeeeeee'
    #”
$ beet -vv config
[...clip...]
Sending event: library_opened
verbose: 2
library: e:\songs\beetslibrary.bib

replace:
    qqqqqqq: eeeeeeeee

Sending event: cli_exit

Based on our experience last time, I also tried removing the newline from the end of the file—still no issue.

I'm kind of stumped. Maybe it has something to do with Windows?

[RollingStar]

Happens with or without the newline. Note the troublesome character is U+201D and not a normal quote ". All these don't work.

(This first one fails on Powershell as well as normal CMD. I only tested with normal CMD for the others.)

library: e:\songs\beetslibrary.bib

replace:
    'q': '”'

library: e:\songs\beetslibrary.bib

paths:
    default: '”'

library: e:\songs\beetslibrary.bib

paths:
    default: ”

This works:

library: e:\songs\beetslibrary.bib

paths:
    default: a

So, maybe ” is being treated as an escape character? If the text handler parses escape characters before comments # that would explain all the results thus far. edit: By escape character, I mean maybe the text handler stops reading the config once it gets to ”. This leaves beets with a corrupted user config, and it can't find musicbrainz.host. Normally I assume it loads the user config in its entirety, then fills the remainder from the program default config. Or it does it the other way, and this half-loaded user config causes beets to not have a value saved for musicbrainz.host.

edit 2: Delete ␡ also causes problems, even in a comment. I thought I used Unicode like this without issue in previous months.

Maybe the latest Win10 Creators Update changed my console settings? Maybe not.

>chcp 65001
Active code page: 65001

>beet -vv
configuration error: musicbrainz.host not found

Still, because it may be a clue, I'll link to #2456.

edit 3: I forgot that in #2456 I made my own patch to Beets and have been using it since today, when I updated from stable to latest Git. I'll check my fix against these latest issues. I'm guessing this issue is a dupe of 2456.

[RollingStar]

Okay. Applying my fix from #2456 fixes my issue with the quotes and DEL and everything else. However, could error handling be improved for other unforseeable errors?

• Beets reading info to the right of a comment indicator #. Is Beets reading line by line, or the entire file at once? Line by line would have a benefit of being more assured that beets is not reading any line after # appears.
• The "configuration error" that is thrown. What is happening between program defaults & user config that causes this error?

[sampsyo]

OK—that sounds like we're dealing with an encoding error.

I'm guessing that the YAML parser is somehow giving up entirely when it encounters a character it doesn't understand. I'm still at a loss to explain why that leads to the configuration error you're seeing—it seems to throw off the whole configuration system, rather than just exiting with a parse error. It's hard to narrow down what's wrong without a way to reproduce the problem.