[pkg-fso-maint] [debian] phoneuid-messgaes crashes

[arne anka]

> shell and I think it's enough to always return unicode(field_value)
> - without the exception handling.

i had a little chat with steffen earlier and he suggested replacing all  
occurences of str() with unicode() -- i got the impression, that python's  
encoding handling is pretty much pita and am stuill unsure, if that will  
work as expected.
in the beginning (long time ago now) i experienced different problems  
after replacing str with unicode, that's why i always wrap it in  
try/except.

but it may be an idea anyway to simply do it and see what happens,  
shouldn't be worse than the frequent issues with non-ascii, should it?