Saxon » SaxonC

A sample Python program doing e.g.

from saxonche import PySaxonProcessor

with PySaxonProcessor(license=False) as saxon_proc:
    print(saxon_proc.version)

    xpath_processor = saxon_proc.new_xpath_processor()

    print(xpath_processor.evaluate('current-dateTime()'))

with the official SaxonCHE 12.4 pacakge also outputs that warning on the error output:

SaxonC-HE 12.4 from Saxonica
2023-11-29T21:04:19.0559953+01:00
Illegal format in tzmappings file: illegal null character found at line 1, offset 47.

This sounds like it could be related to https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/3366, but I don't understand how, given that we're using a much more recent Graal build. Seems like a reasonable starting point for the investigation.

At a quick skim, that issue says the GraalVM folks fixed it for JDK12+, but we built Saxon 12.4 with JDK11. Sigh.

Is this limited to Windows 11? I confess we don't currently have any Windows 11 machines around to test with. I've just configured a Windows 11 ARM VM for experimenting with ARM builds, but we don't have those yet so it's not useful for testing.

I was going to propose that we move to JDK 17 and the corresponding GraalVM release for Saxon 13, but perhaps we should try that on Windows for, uhm, 12.4.1.

Is this going to effect the PHP and Python tooling as well? I sort of assume so...

My skim read was that it was fixed by the Graal release we’re using, and that the underlying problem began with JDK 12, which is why I was baffled. I am going to take a closer look shortly.

Norm Tovey-Walsh wrote in #note-3:

At a quick skim, that issue says the GraalVM folks fixed it for JDK12+, but we built Saxon 12.4 with JDK11. Sigh.

Is this limited to Windows 11?

I have now tested the command tools of SaxonC HE 12.4 on AMD64 Linux under Ubuntu 22.04 WSL, as well as the testXPath/XQuery/XSLT30 programs and none of them emits that warning/error about the tzmappings file, so based on that I would say the problem is limited to Windows, it doesn't occur under Linux.

On Windows 10 running python saxon_example2.py under directory pypi\sample reproduces the same message.