Cannot handle double byte characters

[brianfreud]

Using a .ged encoded in UTF8. The double byte character "�" (erroniously) was in the content of a couple of NOTE+CONT tags.

The parser threw an "Invalid format" error for the line and halted processing of the file.

[FlorianCassayre]

Thanks for taking the time to open a ticket.
This seems weird indeed; normally the library will attempt to find a CHAR tag in the header and use it, otherwise it will fall back to UTF-8 as a default charset. That means the parser likely attempted to decode it from UTF-8.

Could you please share the bogus .ged file - or a minimal version of it - to: contact@arbre.app. I'm the only recipient of this inbox and I will delete the file as soon as I can reproduce the issue.

As a side note the parsing errors aren't very helpful in 0.2.0, they are improved in 0.2.1 (not yet released).

[FlorianCassayre]

Hi @brianfreud, do you have any updates on this issue?
There is no hurry but as such I can't reproduce the issue, so I'll leave the ticket open until more precisions are added.

[kefniark]

Getting similar issue with a gedcom file generated by heredis

ErrorTokenization: Invalid format for line 590644: "3 CONT ** disc\☺ ; * disc\☺ ;; ; * \disc\☺ ;; * \circle\☺ ;; ; * Peronnelle de Lezversault, dame de Brélidy"

[FlorianCassayre]

Thanks, I'll look into that in a week (currently on vacation).

[FlorianCassayre]

@kefniark I'm not sure exactly what went wrong; I should definitely improve these error messages to include the detected encoding and other potentially relevant information.
Would you mind sharing the file with which you encountered the issue? You may privately mail it to: contact@arbre.app. Thanks in advance.

[kefniark]

No worries, at the end I run into other issues and realize it would probably not work with this library.
The file I have to work with is also too big for embeded usage I wanted (60k+ people).

So at the end, I went another way

• I used https://www.npmjs.com/package/parse-gedcom as a CLI tools to parse gedcom > json > sqlite
• And my app is not aware of what a gedcom file is, and just query a sqlite database

[FlorianCassayre]

Thanks for the reply, I understand better.

This package is known to work on large files. For instance the file DYNASTIE.ged (34 MB) contains 65k individuals and loads in about 10 seconds on https://mon.arbre.app. If you are only interested in the JSON representation of the file, this is also possible (see parseGedcom).

This package was in fact designed to address some of the limitations of parse-gedcom; for instance the lack of character encoding detection.
It seems that the source of these issues is that the tokenizer is too strict and will reject inputs that do not align with the specification, although they could be parsed normally.