Paths containing characters other than 7-bit ASCII cause failure

[DaveInCaz]

Issue overview

Running EnergyPlus with a command like the following will cause it to fail:

energyplus.exe -d D:\ß D:\ß\sample.idf

Output:

EnergyPlus Starting
EnergyPlus, Version 23.2.0-7636e6b3e9, YMD=2024.05.01 11:29
**FATAL:The SQLite database failed to open.
EnergyPlus Run Time=00hr 00min  0.19sec
Program terminated: EnergyPlus Terminated--Error(s) Detected.

If however the folder were named B instead of ß, all else being equal, it would work normally.

The folder D:\ß actually has to exist for this error to occur. The contents of the IDF file don't seem to matter.

---

Notes - I think the problem occurs when using a folder path having any ASCII/Unicode character over 7F. Furthermore, varied higher bitness characters fail in different ways.

I tried the following examples as folder names (all char values in hex):

• B (ASCII 42) - runs normally
• � (ASCII 7F or "del" - the last 7-bit value) - not a printable character, but still runs normally
• € (ASCII 80 - the first 8-bit value) - fails with SQLite error
• Â (Unicode 00C2) - fails with SQLite error
• ß (Unicode 00DF) - fails with SQLite error (the example given above)
• Б (Unicode 0411) - fails but in a different way - see below

For the example of Б which is 2 bytes in Unicode, EnergyPlus terminates without ever writing anything to the terminal, unlike the 128-bit ASCII and 1-byte Unicode examples which show the SQLite error.

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Note on relevance -- This was discovered because I support users who can have usernames containing Unicode characters, and therefore their local paths also contain that character. (Just to point out that this is not at all a hypothetical problem.)

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We used to use EnergyPlus 9.5 before updating to 23.2, and to my knowledge never ran into this before. Perhaps this is related to some of the command-line updates for CLI11 in 23.2 (mentioned in #10322) although that's just a guess and might not actually make sense given the SQLite error. [EDIT - maybe similar issues did exist earlier, I'll add a follow up post]

Details

Some additional details for this issue (if relevant):

• Platform: Windows 10, 11
• Version of EnergyPlus: 23.2

[DaveInCaz]

A colleague ran tests with earlier versions and found similar problems, though the exact error messages are not all the same.

9.5

C:\>EnergyPlus\EnergyPlusV9-5-0\EnergyPlus -d d:\ß\  d:\ß\Test_V950.idf
EnergyPlus Starting
EnergyPlus, Version 9.5.0-de239b2e5f, YMD=2024.05.01 11:56
  File "<string>", line 1
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xdf in position 0: unexpected end of data
**FATAL:ERROR adding "d:\\▀" to the sys.path in Python
EnergyPlus Run Time=00hr 00min  0.20sec
Program terminated: EnergyPlus Terminated--Error(s) Detected.

9.6

C:\>EnergyPlus\EnergyPlusV9-6-0\EnergyPlus -d d:\ß\  d:\ß\Test_V960.idf
EnergyPlus Starting
EnergyPlus, Version 9.6.0-f420c06a69, YMD=2024.05.01 11:56
  File "<string>", line 1
    sys.path.insert(0, "d:\\�")
                            ^
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xdf in position 0: unexpected end of data
**FATAL:ERROR adding "d:\\ß" to the sys.path in Python
EnergyPlus Run Time=00hr 00min  0.09sec
Program terminated: EnergyPlus Terminated--Error(s) Detected.

22.1

C:\>EnergyPlus\EnergyPlusV22-1-0\EnergyPlus -d d:\ß\  d:\ß\Test_V2210.idf
EnergyPlus Starting
EnergyPlus, Version 22.1.0-ed759b17ee, YMD=2024.05.01 11:57
  File "<string>", line 1
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xdf in position 0: unexpected end of data
**FATAL:ERROR adding "d:\\ß" to the sys.path in Python
EnergyPlus Run Time=00hr 00min  0.09sec
Program terminated: EnergyPlus Terminated--Error(s) Detected.

22.2

C:\>EnergyPlus\EnergyPlusV22-2-0\EnergyPlus -d d:\ß\  d:\ß\Test_V2220.idf
EnergyPlus Starting
EnergyPlus, Version 22.2.0-c249759bad, YMD=2024.05.01 11:57
  File "<string>", line 1
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xdf in position 0: unexpected end of data
**FATAL:ERROR adding "d:\\ß" to the sys.path in Python
EnergyPlus Run Time=00hr 00min  0.09sec
Program terminated: EnergyPlus Terminated--Error(s) Detected.