i3ipc 2.x and Py2 compatibility

[dheuvels]

I had to change a few lines in i3-workspace-names-daemon to get it running in my i3 environment.

ac94f27 Fixes an issue with the 2.x versions of i3ipc.
The WorkspaceReply class is not a dict anymore, causing "TypeError: 'WorkspaceReply' object is not subscriptable". I added the getattr() function, which will work with both flavours of the WorkspaceReply class.

85a4306 adds the u'' prefix to string literals. I had a usecase with Python2 and this was required to get it running. I know that Python2 is deprecated and i3ipc only supports Py2 up to 1.7.1, but as it only takes a few prefixes to keep it functional, it's maybe worth it.

[CastixGitHub]

Hi @dheuvels
I am trying to figure out how you got this working on python2:
I installed i3ipc 1.7.1 with pip2
if I run this script with python2, it gets closed (the main returns) whenever i open/close/etc a window and the names remain the same
Thanks

[dheuvels]

Hi @CastixGitHub,

I am trying to figure out how you got this working on python2

There seems to be a bug in i3ipc 1.7.1 that eats up the stack traces of exceptions. When I use 1.6.0, I see the trace:

% git clone https://github.com/cboddy/i3-workspace-names-daemon.git && cd i3-workspace-names-daemon
% python2 -m virtualenv i3ipc_venv
% . i3ipc_venv/bin/activate
% pip install i3ipc==1.6.0
% python2 ./i3_workspace_names_daemon.py
Traceback (most recent call last): (..)
  File "./i3_workspace_names_daemon.py", line 95, in rename
    workspace.name.replace('"', '\\"'), newname.replace('"', '\\"')))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\uf120' in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)

So Python is complaining about this (new) replace statement in line 95, which uses an ASCII string:

commands.append('rename workspace "{}" to "{}"'.format(workspace.name.replace('"', '\\"'), newname.replace('"', '\\"')))

If you use a unicode string, it is working:

 commands.append(u'rename workspace "{}" to "{}"'.format(workspace.name.replace('"', '\\"'), newname.replace('"', '\\"')))

(note the u'rename).

I haven't figured out what is causing the problem with the missing traces in 1.7.1. But if you change the replace call, then it will also run with 1.7.1.

Regards,
Dirk