fix: show unicode in toasts

[sanzoghenzo]

closes #2484

Title and message with unicode chars (I tried emojis) work, actions and sounds don't.

Now that I think of it, we could use the Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.Notifications .NET package for that instead of relying on a powershell script...

[sanzoghenzo]

I should have tried it inside pyRevit before submitting it 😅 I simplified some things and made the function signature compatible with pyrevit.forms.toast, so that I could drop it (I still import the toast function inside forms __init__, so nothing changed for the user).

The problem now is... IronPython's ElementTree doesn't seem to work with unicode, so I'm back at square one 😓

@dosymep I saw that you wrote a comment about the dependency, do you think that using an UWP component will break things?

[dosymep]

do you think that using an UWP component will break things?

yep
how it is work? why do you use powershell?

[sanzoghenzo]

do you think that using an UWP component will break things?

yep

Would it be better to use Windows.UI.Notifications?

how it is work? why do you use powershell?

Because I just ported the go code of the previous pyrevit-toaster.exe, or to be precise a fork that should have solved the unicode issue (but used string templating instead of an xml library to build the configuration).
I just removed a step, I call directly powershell instead of a go binary that in turn calls powershell.
The powershell calls in fact the Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastNotificationManager to display the toast.

[dosymep]

go binary that in turn calls powershell

oh okay :)

[sanzoghenzo]

I am so close... but I don't know how to solve it!

I switched to string templates to avoid unwanted etree string escaping;
I also fixed the flashing powershell window (i forgot to add a flag to subcommand)

Now the Test Button in DevTools shows a "??" instead of the rocket, but if I copy the script from the debug log and paste into powershell with powershell -NoProfile -NonInteractive -Command prepended, the toast correctly shows the emoji (even thow it is shown as "??" in the powershell window)...

I tried to encode/decode the strings, but no combination works... As always, ChatGPT is full of shit.
Any Ideas how to properly pass the unicode text to powershell as-is?

BTW, I also tried using Windows.UI.Notification, but obviously it needed an assembly that is not referenced, and I'm too lazy to try to add it (where? should it be pyRevitLabs.Runtime?) and recompile 😅

EDIT: oh, python 2.7 subprocess doesn't work with unicode on windows....
There's a pathced subprocess that should do the work, not sure if I want to add yet another custom thing to solve a silly problem

[dosymep]

I would help you, but for some reason notifications don't work on my version of the operating system

[sanzoghenzo]

I tried to add the patch for windows subprocess, it shows the correct toast but subprocess.check_output throws an exception.
I tried various iterations with Popen, call and check_call, they give me a TypeError that I can't understand (something related to the ctypes).

Since this isn't an high priority task, I'm giving up on this and remove the issue form the pyrevit 5 RC milestone, if someone else wants to pick it up it's more than welcome to do so!