FAQ / Troubleshooting
+While running eCalc as a Unix command-line tool, you may come across seemingly incomprehensible error messages. +This page tries to explain some common error messages and proposes how to fix them.
+Indentation errors
+In YAML, the indentation is very important and specifies the level in the hierarchy for the input. +If you have the wrong indentation somewhere, you may get both YAML read errors and/or eCalc setup errors.
+Error messages due to YAML read problems
+The following error messages are common when you have formatting issues in your YAML file:
+mapping values are not allowed here
while scanning a simple key in "<setupfile.yml>", line <n>, column <m>
could not find expected ':', line <n>, column <m>
while parsing a block mapping in <setupfile>, line <n>, column <m>
expected <block end>, but found '<block mapping start>'
Error messages due to invalid eCalc configuration
+The configuration expects a sub-hierarchy of data. After reading YAML, this data sub-hierarchy would be of object type +dictionary (dict) and in some cases contain lists or other objects. If invalid data is input, the error message would +indicate that the type is wrong because it is not a 'dict'/'list' or other type
+None should be instance of 'dict'
None should be instance of 'list'
Proposed solution
+Check your YAML setup file for correct indentation and correct format of values for each eCalc key.
+Special characters in Unicode
+eCalc uses ruamel.yaml to read the YAML setup files. Some (text) files have an encoding not supported and will thus result in an error message.
+One example of this is an unrecognized "BOM" character in "UTF-8 Unicode".
+Error message
+while scanning a simple key in "<setupfile.yml>", line <n>, column 1
could not find expected ':', line <n>, column 1
Proposed solution
+Check the encoding of your setupfile (and inputfiles):
+$ file <setupfile>.yml
If the output of this is not "ASCII text", convert your file to "US-ASCII" using iconv.
+Example when <setupfile>.yml is of type "UTF-8"
$ iconv -f UTF-8 -t US-ASCII//TRANSLIT -o <new_setup_file_name_ascii>.yml <old_setup_file_name_utf-8>.yml
Now try to run again using the new file <new_setup_file_name_ascii>.yml.