locale.strxfrm raising an error on characters incompatible with the locale.

[oussjarrousse]

after rednotebook reads all the day files, and when it is trying to sort categories, it raises an error.

After some investigation I found out that the error is related to locale.strxfrm in line 516 in journal.py:

    @property
    def categories(self):
        return sorted(
            set(itertools.chain.from_iterable(day.categories for day in self.days)),
            key=locale.strxfrm,
        )

What I think is happening is that locale.strxfrm does not accept characters that are incompatible with the locale.
For example, my locale is en.US.UTF-8. For example: locale.strxfrm("عربي") will raise an error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/ouss/Documents/workspace/rednotebook/rednotebook/journal.py", line 624, in <module>
    main()
  File "/Users/ouss/Documents/workspace/rednotebook/rednotebook/journal.py", line 606, in main
    journal = Journal()
  File "/Users/ouss/Documents/workspace/rednotebook/rednotebook/journal.py", line 238, in __init__
    self.open_journal(journal_path)
  File "/Users/ouss/Documents/workspace/rednotebook/rednotebook/journal.py", line 401, in open_journal
    self.frame.categories_tree_view.categories = self.categories
  File "/Users/ouss/Documents/workspace/rednotebook/rednotebook/journal.py", line 514, in categories
    return sorted(
OSError: [Errno 22] Invalid argument

What I wish to happen, is that categories are sorted regardless of the characters type or locale.

[jendrikseipp]

Do you know what needs to be changed to fix this?

[oussjarrousse]

We have several options. Can you confirm that the purpose of using locale.strxfrm here is to sort the categories based on the locale settings of the user?

If that was the case. We could use an alternative sorting mechanism that will respect the locale but not break on incompatible characters.

Is there a test for this function?

My plan is to:

• create a test that reproduce it (regression test)
• create a fix and make sure all tests pass.
• create a pull request.

[jendrikseipp]

Yes, I can confirm this. Your approach sounds great!

[oussjarrousse]

I've created a pull request that fixes the issue... at least for me...
Looking forward for your review...