GNS3 config import problem with non-UTF config files

Hello

Today I spent like an hour when my GNS3 couldn’t properly import configs and would give the following output in the console:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File „/usr/share/gns3/gns3-gui/lib/python3.5/site-packages/gns3/qt/__init__.py”, line 241, in partial
return func(*args, **kwargs)
File „/usr/share/gns3/gns3-gui/lib/python3.5/site-packages/gns3/http_client.py”, line 652, in _processResponse
callback(params, server=server, context=context, raw_body=raw_body)
File „/usr/share/gns3/gns3-gui/lib/python3.5/site-packages/gns3/qt/__init__.py”, line 241, in partial
return func(*args, **kwargs)
File „/usr/share/gns3/gns3-gui/lib/python3.5/site-packages/gns3/dialogs/file_editor_dialog.py”, line 69, in _getCallback
self.uiFileTextEdit.setText(raw_body.decode(„utf-8”))
UnicodeDecodeError: ‚utf-8’ codec can’t decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

It turned out that there were some weird chinese characters at the beginning of the files, which in the hex editor looked as follows:

EFBFBDEF BFBD

As usual, the solution is simple: the txt files I had were not in the UTF-8 format. With the application UTFcast Express you can convert your non-utf files into the UTF format.

Now I can go back to my labs…