[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#2743) Blank messages and bad packet strings

["Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 6 Jan 2003, Guest via RT wrote:

> Occasionally I get blank lines in my message window.  It will be as if
> an event happened, but it enters a blank line instead of the correct
> text for the event.  When it happens, civclient complains that it
> "received bad string in packet".  A savegame is available at
> http://kenn-michelle.ca:8080/freeciv/kenn.sav.gz.  Join as kenn, then
> move the diplomat into the city and attempt to steal a tech.  If the
> diplomat isn't caught, it will message a blank line instead of saying
> which tech was stolen, and the client says: 1: received bad string in
> packet (type 16, len 72) from server.  If the diplomat keeps getting
> caught, try moving the explorer (same square) to somewhere else first.
>
> Also, when I start that save game, the client gives a bunch of these:
> 1: received bad string in packet (type 75, len 132) from server
> 1: received bad string in packet (type 75, len 124) from server
>
> I'm using gtk2 client from Jan 5 cvs.  The blank lines sometimes happen
> with other events too, but they're not too common.. perhaps once every
> 20 turns or so.

Are you a RedHat 8.0 user?
Is your current charset UTF-8? If you are unsure check it by running the
command 'locale'. Here is the output it produces in my system:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

If you are one of these unfortunate users the problem is that the freeciv
server is not charset clean. You must start the freeciv server in a
ISO-8859-1 locale as well as the client.

How to do it:

export LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1
./civ &
./ser

Did this solve your problem?

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa