#34 No utf-8 support

[milhouse]

Neither passwords nor other attributes can have non-ascii characters. It is impossible to open a kbdx file with a special char in the password.

[Lester Hightower]

I'm not positive and I don't have a lot of time to reserch this now, but it's possible that upgrading to Term::ReadLine::Gnu-1.32 or newer (released in mid-2016), and then using its new enableUTF8 support might work, or at least get you underway to a real solution.

https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=104239

You may also be able to stop using Term::ReadLine::Gnu (not my personal preference) and apply some of the things discussed here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31573117/using-termreadline-with-unicode-input

In kpcli verion 3.1, the code that you'd want to modify is in the get_readline_term() function that starts on line 4,962.

If you find a workable solution I would appreciate it if you shared it back.

[milhouse]

Thanks.
I'm not aware of perl and cpan. Looking at it today didn't bring me far.
It will take some time for me to get into the basics.

[Lester Hightower]

I spent a few minutes this morning testing this and it appears to me that utf8 is properly supported by kpcli v3.1 (the only one that I tested). In fact, the results were surprising to me and may explain why no one has complained in the past.

I started by testing kpcli-3.1 with Term::Readline::Gnu v1.35 (on Ubuntu 17.10). Here is an example of that test; note the UTF bullet character ("\u2022") in the Uname field:

hightowe:~/bin/kpcli.d$ ./kpcli-3.1.pl --kdb=./test-utf8.kdb
Please provide the master password: *******

KeePass CLI (kpcli-3.1) v3.1 is ready for operation.
Type 'help' for a description of available commands.
Type 'help ' for details on individual commands.

kpcli-3.1:/> show Internet/foo

Path: /Internet/
Title: foo
Uname: • test
Pass:
URL:
Notes:

kpcli-3.1:/> vers
VERSIONS

• kpcli: 3.1
• Perl: v5.26.0
• File::KeePass: 2.03
• Term::ShellUI: 0.92
• Term::ReadKey: 2.37
• Term::ReadLine: 1.16
• Capture::Tiny: 0.46
• Clipboard: 0.13
• Math::Random::ISAAC: 1.003
• Sub::Install: 0.928
• Term::ReadLine::Gnu: 1.35

ReadLine being used: Term::ReadLine::Gnu
Operating system: linux ("Ubuntu 17.10")
kpcli-3.1:/>

What surprised me is that when I tested this file with kpcli-3.1 on Mint 17 (based on Ubuntu 14.04) it also worked, for both read and write. I had tested that exact setup before I replied to you last week, and it did not work. The only difference in my test last week and today is that last week I was using Putty from Windows and today I was using XTerm on Linux. I now suspect that the terminals, and not the Term::ReadLine::Gnu version, is the difference in utf8 support working or not.

This is my terminal setup that works on Mint 17:

hightowe:~/bin/kpcli.d$ set|grep TERM
TERM=xterm
XTERM_LOCALE=en_US.UTF-8
XTERM_SHELL=/bin/bash
XTERM_VERSION='XTerm(297)'

and the module versions being used by kpcli in my Mint 17 installation:

kpcli-3.1:/> vers
VERSIONS

• kpcli: 3.1
• Perl: v5.18.2
• File::KeePass: 2.03
• Term::ShellUI: 0.92
• Term::ReadKey: 2.31
• Term::ReadLine: 1.12
• Capture::Tiny: 0.24
• Clipboard: 0.13
• Math::Random::ISAAC: 1.003
• Sub::Install: 0.927
• Term::ReadLine::Gnu: 1.20

ReadLine being used: Term::ReadLine::Gnu
Operating system: linux ("Linux Mint 17 Qiana")
kpcli-3.1:/>

With this finding, I intend to close this bug as not valid / won't fix, but this bug report might prove useful to others. Good luck getting your environment setup to properly support utf8.

[Lester Hightower]

Back at my office today, and on the same Putty environment that I was on last week when I saw kpcli not support UTF-8, and I figured out why and how to fix it. It is very simple and is described in this article: http://thegreyblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/configuring-putty-to-use-utf-8.html

In short:

• Choose menu: Change settings...
• Windows -> Translation
• Choose UTF-8 from the drop down

As soon as I did that, UTF-8 support in kpcli-3.1 seemed to work as it should.