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.