Dvc exp show messed up output

Questions
1

Hello,

sometimes when I use dvc exp show I get a message like this:

"/path/to/some/temp/dir/pydoc.out" may be a binary file.  See it anyway?

If I press “y” then the output looks like this:

 <E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94>
  Experiment      Created    pipelines/big/summary.yaml:auc   pipelines/big/summary.yaml:fat   pipelines/big/summary.yaml:surface_auc   pipelines/big/summary.yaml:surface_fat   pipelines/bi
 <E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94>
  workspace       -                                  0.9794                         0.037955                                  0.98549                                 0.024847
  small-ecc-jfl   09:10 AM                           0.9794                         0.037955                                  0.98549                                 0.024847
 <E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94><80><E2><94>
/scratch/pbstmp/186685.vectivus.cm.cluster/tmpmfn_ajjp/pydoc.out (END)

Easy workaround is to use the --md option. I am just curious why this happens sometimes.

2

Hi @gregstarr, this looks to be the same as dvc exp show: outputs a binary file in macOS · Issue #6968 · iterative/dvc · GitHub. Could you try the fix mentioned there?

2 Likes
3

The dvc exp show CLI table output is in UTF-8. If your terminal environment/locale is not set to also use UTF-8 you will get that kind of error. Most likely the machine you are running on is using something like latin1 or just plain ascii as the terminal locale and so it cannot display the unicode characters used in the exp show table.

4

initially:

locale
LANG=C
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_PAPER="C"
LC_NAME="C"
LC_ADDRESS="C"
LC_TELEPHONE="C"
LC_MEASUREMENT="C"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="C"
LC_ALL=

then I used

export LANG=en_US.utf8

and now dvc exp show works normally.

Thanks for the help! I see that this issue has already been raised and solved. I searched for a similar issue within this forum but couldn’t find anything. Is there a way to search across discuss, github issues and discord at the same time? Or would you recommend first looking in github issues?

5

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a way to search across everywhere at once.