subprocess.run(..., capture_output=True, text=True) with no explicit
encoding falls back to locale.getpreferredencoding(False) -- the OS
default codepage. On Windows that's a legacy single-byte codepage
(e.g. cp1252), never UTF-8. When the LuaJIT dump contains a byte with
no mapping in that codepage, subprocess's internal _readerthread
crashes with an uncaught UnicodeDecodeError in a background thread; the
thread dies silently and the caller gets back stdout=None instead of a
string, crashing one line later with
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'splitlines'.
Concretely, the Yellow-side imported dataset contains:
"_ColosseumHeightText" -> "...6’8” tall!"
The right double quotation mark (U+201D) encodes in UTF-8 as E2 80 9D;
0x9D has no defined character in cp1252, so decoding as cp1252 fails
outright. Verified against the real imported dataset: the Red/Blue-only
dump has zero bytes outside cp1252's defined range; the Yellow dump has
exactly one, at this row.
UTF-8 is the actual encoding these dumps are produced in -- the driver
Lua sources are read/written as UTF-8 throughout this file, and LuaJIT
writes those source strings' bytes back out verbatim -- so passing
encoding="utf-8" explicitly at the three affected call sites
(run_loader, check_data_dump, dump_dataset) is a no-op on platforms
whose default codepage is already UTF-8 (Linux/macOS) and a correctness
fix on Windows.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This fixes the nil value returned when running validate or pack on Fedora 43. Since Love isn't running, luajit calls on an empty table. Providing a stub table resolves the nil error.