ShareableList corrupts multi-byte UTF-8 strings and bytes with trailing nulls
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Description
Bug report
Bug description:
Issue
ShareableList allocates string slots based on character count instead of UTF-8 byte count, causing corruption for multi-byte characters. Additionally, rstrip(b'\x00') strips legitimate trailing null bytes from bytes values.
Note: The trailing null bytes issue was originally reported in #106939 (July 2023) and documented as a known issue with a workaround. This fix attempts to resolve both that long-standing issue and the newly discovered UTF-8 corruption bug.
Reproducer
from multiprocessing.shared_memory import ShareableList
# String corruption
sl = ShareableList(['0\U00010000\U00010000'])
print(sl[0]) # UnicodeDecodeError
sl.shm.close(); sl.shm.unlink()
# Bytes corruption
sl = ShareableList([b'\x00'])
print(repr(sl[0])) # b'' instead of b'\x00'
sl.shm.close(); sl.shm.unlink()
CPython versions tested on:
CPython main branch
Operating systems tested on:
No response
Linked PRs
- gh-145266
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start at the multiprocessing.shared_memory.ShareableList entry point and run the two reproducer snippets from the issue. Done means multi-byte strings remain decodable and bytes values preserve trailing null bytes; review linked PR gh-145266 before starting because work is already underway.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- operating-systems
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Clearly specified
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100