I have written and maintain a PEP 249 compliant (hopefully) DB API for the 4D 
database, and I've run into a situation where corrupted string data from the 
database can cause the module to error out. Specifically, when decoding the 
string, I get a "UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-16-le' codec can't decode bytes in 
position 86-87: illegal UTF-16 surrogate" error. This makes sense, given that 
the string data got corrupted somehow, but the question is "what is the proper 
way to deal with this in the module?" Should I just throw an error on bad data? 
Or would it be better to set the errors parameter to something like "replace"? 
The former feels a bit more "proper" to me (there's an error here, so we throw 
an error), but leaves the end user dead in the water, with no way to retrieve 
*any* of the data (from that row at least, and perhaps any rows after it as 
well). The latter option sort of feels like sweeping the problem under the rug, 
but does at least leave an error character in the string to l
 et them know there was an error, and will allow retrieval of any good data.

Of course, if this was in my own code I could decide on a case-by-case basis 
what the proper action is, but since this a module that has to work in any 
situation, it's a bit more complicated.
-----------------------------------------------
Israel Brewster
Systems Analyst II
Ravn Alaska
5245 Airport Industrial Rd
Fairbanks, AK 99709
(907) 450-7293
-----------------------------------------------




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