codecs / subprocess interaction: utf help requested

[smitty1e]

On Jun 10, 6:10 pm, John Machin <sjmac... at lexicon.net> wrote:
> On Jun 11, 7:17 am, smitty1e <smitt... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > The first print statement does what you'd expect.
> > The second print statement has rather a lot of rat in it.
> > The goal here is to write a function that will return the man page for
> > some command (mktemp used as a short example here) as text to client
> > code, where the groff markup will be chopped to extract all of the
> > command options.  Those options will eventually be used within an
> > emacs mode, all things going swimmingly.
> > I don't know what's going on with the piping in the second version.
> > It looks like the output of p0 gets converted to unicode at some
> > point,
>
> Whatever gave you that idea?
>
> > but I might be misunderstanding what's going on.  The 4.8
> > codecs  module documentation doesn't really offer much enlightment,
> > nor google.  About the only other place I can think to look would be
> > the unit test cases shipped with python.
>
> Get your head out of the red herring factory; unicode, "utf" (which
> one?) and codecs have nothing to do with your problem. Think about
> looking at your own code and at the bzip2 documentation.
>
>
>
> > Sort of hoping one of the guru-level pythonistas can point to
> > illumination, or write something to help out the next chap.  This
> > might be one of those catalytic questions, the answer to which tackles
> > five other questions you didn't really know you had.
> > Thanks,
> > Chris
> > ---------------------------
> > #!/usr/bin/python
> > import subprocess
>
> > p = subprocess.Popen(["bzip2", "-c", "-d", "/usr/share/man/man1/mktemp.
> > 1.bz2"]
> >                     , stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
> > stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
> > print stdout
>
> > p0 = subprocess.Popen(["cat","/usr/share/man/man1/mktemp.1.bz2"],
> > stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
> > p1 = subprocess.Popen(["bzip2"], stdin=p0.stdout                ,
> > stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
> > stdout, stderr = p1.communicate()
> > print stdout
> > ---------------------------
>
> You left out the command-line options for bzip2. The "rat" that you
> saw was the result of compressing the already-compressed man page.
> Read this:http://www.bzip.org/docs.html
> which is a bit obscure. The --help output from my copy of an antique
> (2001, v1.02) bzip2 Windows port explains it plainly:
> """
>    If invoked as `bzip2', default action is to compress.
>               as `bunzip2',  default action is to decompress.
>               as `bzcat', default action is to decompress to stdout.
>
>    If no file names are given, bzip2 compresses or decompresses
>    from standard input to standard output.
> """
>
> HTH,
> John

Don't I feel like the biggest dork on the planet.
I had started with
>cat /usr/share/man/man1/paludis.1.bz2 | bunzip2
then proceeded right to a self-foot-shoot when I went to python.
*sigh*
Thanks for the calibration, sir.
Rm
C