Potential Fix For Crashes Caused By Non-UTF-8 IRC Input

[GeorgiaM-honestly]

Hello,

I was having a lot of problems with crashes caused by non-UTF-8 IRC input. This won't hit most users because I'm using it in, shall we say, a completely insane channel, but perhaps this fix: 1) works 2) is desirable

I am using the next branch here.

Error examples, both triggered by the same IRC input at the same time:

Instance 1 running on a bare metal system (I call it "BM"):

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/shithead-x/virtualenvs/shithead-X-next/./gpt2_bot.py", line 6, in <module>
    bot.start()
  File "/home/shithead-x/virtualenvs/shithead-X-next/gpt2_bot/irc.py", line 65, in start
    lines = self.socket.recv(524288).decode("UTF-8")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode bytes in position 508-509: invalid continuation byte


Instance 2 running in a virtual machine, which I call "VM":

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./gpt2_bot.py", line 6, in <module>
    bot.start()
  File "/home/shithead-x/virtualenvs/shithead-X-next/gpt2_bot/irc.py", line 65, in start
    lines = self.socket.recv(524288).decode("UTF-8")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode bytes in position 508-509: invalid continuation byte

Potential fix: Change line 65 in irc.py to:

lines = self.socket.recv(524288).decode("UTF-8", errors='ignore')

Another option for errors= is 'replace' however I have not experimented with that. Previously under the conditions each of the bots would only last a few minutes before encountering the issue and crashing. I let both of them run overnight in those conditions without a single crash.

Credit should go to irc.libera.chat #python for helping me.

What do you think?

[albino]

yep, nice, good catch.

do you want to submit a pull request, or are you happy for me to make the fix?

[GeorgiaM-honestly]

Good to hear! I don't really know what a pull request is, could you make the fix? Whichever is less work for you.

I am still having other, far less frequent crashes not related to this, is there somewhere we can talk (such as irc)?