RE: Odd characters in temperatures showing in Phoebus

["Leblanc, Gregory via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Sorry, I’ve failed to link to the working git repo for my mess:

https://github.com/gregoryleblanc/CsHeater

 

The file in question is:

https://github.com/gregoryleblanc/CsHeater/blob/main/CsHeaterApp/Db/Watlow_PM_Monitor.template

 

I don’t have a head on the Pi running the softIoc, but I do have another linux box here.  I’ll get CSS installed and see what it says.  I can probably also get debugging info from the windows version, although the console output is very noisy.

      Greg

 

From: Kasemir, Kay <kasemirk at ornl.gov>
Sent: Tuesday, October 5, 2021 11:07 AM
To: Leblanc, Gregory <leblanc at ohio.edu>
Subject: Re: Odd characters in temperatures showing in Phoebus

 

Hi:

 

If I understand correctly, you do have the UTF-8 0xc2b0 in the EPICS database file, good.

caget on Linux also shows that as a degree sign.

Can you run CSS on Linux to see what comes up in the GUI?

 

It's possible that it all works on Linux because UTF-8 tends to be the default there.

On Windows we might be missing something in the CSS code to select UTF-8, so we end up with some other default and thus the characters are not correctly mapped.

 

-Kay

 

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From: Leblanc, Gregory <leblanc at ohio.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, October 5, 2021 10:53 AM
To: Kasemir, Kay <kasemirk at ornl.gov>
Cc: tech-talk at aps.anl.gov <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] RE: Odd characters in temperatures showing in Phoebus

 

Looking at Watlow_PM_Monitor.template in Notepad++ with the HEX editor installed, I see that it is already showing 0xC2 0xB0 (screenshot attached). 

 

When I look at the Windows ANSI (windows-1252) code page, I see that 0xC2 is for Latin Capital letter A with circumflex, and 0xB0 is degree sign.  So that explains why I’m seeing the double characters in Phoebus, though not what to do about it.

 

Next I tried running “> caget -d CTRL_DOUBLE SP_Cesium:Oven_Heater:ProcessValue1 > bad.txt

 

That command always shows the strange character, regardless of what is displayed on the console.  When I open that file in notepad++, I get the strange T character.  When I look at the hex dump, it shows the “┬” character is encoded as 0x2c 0x25.  It also shows a “░” character with an encoding of 0x91 0x25.

 

‘file bad.txt’ from WSL reports:

bad.txt: Little-endian UTF-16 Unicode text, with CRLF line terminators

 

I don’t seem to get the strange character encoding when I run caget from linux, which would make sense if it’s somehow related to the windows codepage.

     Greg

 

 

From: Kasemir, Kay <kasemirk at ornl.gov>
Sent: Monday, October 4, 2021 4:52 PM
To: Leblanc, Gregory <leblanc at ohio.edu>
Subject: Re: Odd characters in temperatures showing in Phoebus

 

Well, try to use some type of hex editor to edit the database file and make it

 

  field(EGU, "xxxx")

 

and for the xxxx you need to get 0xC2 0xB0 in there, because that's the UTF-8 for the degree symbol, http://www.unicode-symbol.com/u/00B0.html

 

Or simply use 

 

  field(EGU, "C")

 

or

 

  field(EGU, "Deg C")

 

;-)

 

 

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From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> on behalf of Leblanc, Gregory via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Sent: Monday, October 4, 2021 4:45 PM
To: tech-talk at aps.anl.gov <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] RE: Odd characters in temperatures showing in Phoebus

 

Well, that gives me some interesting results. 

 

Full dump at: https://pastebin.com/4iqDBfem

 

TL;DR:

> caget -d CTRL_DOUBLE SP_Cesium:Oven_Heater:ProcessValue1

    Units:            ┬░

> ssh elsewhere & return

> caget -d CTRL_DOUBLE SP_Cesium:Oven_Heater:ProcessValue1

    Units:            °

 

Same behavior using PowerShell and command prompt.  I don’t see any change to $OutputEncoding before or after the ssh command, nor does manually setting $OutputEncoding = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8 make any difference.  Chcp reports the same active code page before and after ssh (437), so that doesn’t seem to be the right direction.  I don’t have hexdump on windows, yet. 

     Greg

 

From: Kasemir, Kay <kasemirk at ornl.gov>
Sent: Monday, October 4, 2021 3:43 PM
To: tech-talk at aps.anl.gov; Leblanc, Gregory <leblanc at ohio.edu>
Subject: Re: Odd characters in temperatures showing in Phoebus

 

> caget SP_Cesium:Oven_Heater:ProcessValue1

SP_Cesium:Oven_Heater:ProcessValue1 22.855

 

Try

   caget -d CTRL_DOUBLE SP_Cesium:Oven_Heater:ProcessValue1

and note the 'Units'.

Also try

   caget -d CTRL_DOUBLESP_Cesium:Oven_Heater:ProcessValue1 | hexdump -c

to see exactly what characters follow the "Units:"...

 

Fundamentally, phoebus will allow UTF-8 encoded text for the units.

 

-Kay