483549 - UTF8 conversion failure mode particularly painful for .ics calendars

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 334657

(Calendar :: Provider: ICS/WebDAV, defect)

Description

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Trying to subscribe to a calendar of my meetups on meetup.com, I ran into the failure mode where any error decoding UTF-8 causes the entire calendar to be rejected.  This is a pretty painful error mode, especially given that the user may not be able to do anything about it.  The following message ends up in the error console:

Warning: There has been an error reading data for calendar: My Meetups. It has been placed in read-only mode, since changes to this calendar will likely result in data-loss.  You may change this setting by choosing 'Edit Calendar'. Error code: CAL_UTF8_DECODING_FAILED. Description: An error occured while decoding an iCalendar (ics) file as UTF-8. Check that the file, including symbols and accented letters, is encoded using the UTF-8 character encoding.

I wonder if we can't do better, like decode in a lossy manner and/or isolate the lossage to individual properties/parameters.

Comment 1

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

This is clearly a dupe of bug 334657.

The patch in that bug wasn't implemented,because of dataloss concerns, because we would replace special characters not encoded with UTF-8 with question marks. However, given the fact that the user experience we present our users is far from optimal, I wonder whether that wouldn't still be much better than what we currently do.