Problem with )set output characters default

[fahasch]

There is a problem when using the setting )set output characters default in the configuration file .fricas.input. Using this setting, the line -------Categories------- gets replaced by ───── Categories ───── when executing )what categories.
Because of this, the search string in the command startswith that parses )what categories should be adjusted as well.

[hemmecke]

Yes, that seems to be true. So there seem to be people out there using )set output character default. Thank you for reporting.
I guess you know how to fix that yourself.

[fahasch]

I did a stupid fix such that it only works with )set output character default. For me it works but nothing that I could submit as pull request.

[hemmecke]

There are probably various ways to fix it. Since determining the list of identifiers is done in a completely separate process from the one that is used for the actual session, one can simply override whatever was written in .fricas.input as in the following replacement for the respective code in fricaskernel.py.

    pid0 = Popen(['fricas', '-nosman
                 '-eval', ')set output character plain',
                 '-eval', ')what operations',
                 '-eval', ')what categories',
                 '-eval', ')what domains',
                 '-eval', ')what packages',
                 '-eval', ')quit'],stdout=PIPE)

Another way would be to ignore fricas.input for this process by emptying the FRICAS_INITFILE environment variable for the above call. (I do not yet know how that would be done in python and it is also questionable whether that is the best way, since a person might have additional identifiers produced/loaded in his .fricas.input.
A third way is to check for "-" and for "─".
I am not yet sure what the best way would be so that jfricas also works with future versions of FriCAS where )set output character might have been removed.

[fahasch]

If it is a fringe case (it seems like that) then another alternative would be to simply to state that having )set output character default is not allowed. However, I have to say (from experience) it is quite hard to debug where the problem originates from. Personally, I would favour to replace xxx.startswith('----------------') (it appear twice) with

xxx.replace('─','-').startswith('----------------')

One could add a comment that explains why the replace is needed.