[pulseaudio-discuss] "Unable to convert error string to locale, filtering." errors

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sun, 2017-10-29 at 18:34 +0100, Sjoerd Venema wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm getting a lot of "Unable to convert error string to locale, filtering."
> errors in my /var/log/messages. I think PulseAudio is sending them out as
> UTF-8.
> 
> However, my locale -a output contains UTF-8:
>  en_US ISO-8859-1
>  en_US.UTF-8
> 
> Is it a locale issue? If so, which locale should I add?
> Or is it a different kind of problem?
> 
> thanks,
> Sjoerd Venema
> 
> PS: I'm on a small Buildroot Busybox environment.

The error message is printed when trying to convert a system error
message string to UTF-8. One possible reason is that PulseAudio is
built without iconv support, and a system error message is not valid
UTF-8. What is LANG set to? If it's any variant of en_US, it seems
unlikely that the strings would contain characters outside the safe
ASCII set.

If PulseAudio is built with iconv support, then there's apparently some
problem with using iconv, but I don't have any guesses about what the
exact problem might be.

Is it intentional that you have the en_US ISO-8859-1 locale generated?
I don't see the point of having anything else than UTF-8 locales.

-- 
Tanu

https://www.patreon.com/tanuk