Hue_activate_scene and special characters

Configuration
1

Hi,

I tried to set up an automation that activates a hue scene.
The group_name would contain a special character: “Büro” (= study).
I tried various ways, but I only managed to get the automation to work after replacing the special character in the Hue app.
I tried using “scene_name: Buro” (i.e. replacing “ü” for “u” as HA usually does this - the entity corresponding to this “room” is called “light.buro”).
I also tried using an actual “ü” with UTF-8 file encoding, but at least the configtest tool then complains:

ERROR (Thread-1) [homeassistant.util.yaml] unacceptable character #x009f: special characters are not allowed in [...]

Is this a bug or is there another way to get this to work?

Sebastian

2

I would stick with english words for entity id’s and use special chars in the friendly names, you will have an easier time.

3

I usually do, but the name is set within the Hue app and is displayed as the room’s name.
I don’t really want to give English names to “things” that are visible as part of the user interface.
It’s 2017 and not 1997 after all… :wink:

Sebastian

4

I got it now. It’s apparently some kind of encoding issue:
The “ü” when typed on the keyboard appears as “<9f>” and when read from the hue bridge (/api/…/groups) it shows as “√º”.
I copy&pasted the latter into my automation and now it works.

Damn encodings… :wink:

Sebastian

5

Can you post the relevant line of your automation? I’d just like to see how to use encodings for those

6

You don’t have to specifically encode these characters (if you’re thinking along the lines of encoding for special characters in HTML or URLs).
Depending on the involved programs/layers (like editor, shell, terminal) and their settings, the way the character is appearing on your display may differ.

First you need to make sure the configuration (yaml-)file is UTF-8 encoded, i.e.:

# file myautomation.yaml
myautomation.yaml: UTF-8 Unicode text

(you can use iconv to convert a file between different encodings)

And then the character you type must be encoded correctly.
I was editing the yaml file in vim, running inside a ssh session in my Mac’s terminal program and I think the terminal program’s setting was off…

When everything works, the “ü” is encoded as follows:

# grep group_name myautomation.yaml | hexdump -C
00000000  20 20 20 20 67 72 6f 75  70 5f 6e 61 6d 65 3a 20  |    group_name: |
00000010  27 42 c3 bc 72 6f 27 0a                           |'B..ro'.|
                ^^^^^

Sebastian

7

You could just use SublimeText as your editor, then save the file in UTF-8 format, which is one of the options:

Save with Encoding

:wink:

8

That would be an option, but I usually use vi(m) and create/edit the file directly on the host.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I also have installed “rmate” which remotely opens a file in TextMate on my Mac.
Well, once you figure out that a wrong encoding is the culprit, there are a lot of possible solutions…

Sebastian