Graphviz xdot utility fails to parse graphs

Question

Lately I have observed that xdot utility which is implemented in python to view dot graphs is giving me following error when I am trying to open any dot file.

File "/usr/bin/xdot", line 4, in xdot.main()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 1947, in main win.open_file(args[0])
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 1881, in open_file self.set_dotcode(fp.read(), filename)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 1863, in set_dotcode if self.widget.set_dotcode(dotcode, filename):
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 1477, in set_dotcode self.set_xdotcode(xdotcode)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 1497, in set_xdotcode self.graph = parser.parse()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 1167, in parse DotParser.parse(self)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 977, in parse self.parse_graph()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 986, in parse_graph self.parse_stmt()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 1032, in parse_stmt self.handle_node(id, attrs) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 1142, in handle_node shapes.extend(parser.parse()) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 612, in parse w = s.read_number()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdot.py", line 494, in read_number return int(self.read_code()) ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '206.05'

I have observed few things;

• The same utility works fine for me on previous ubuntu versions(12.04, 13.04). The problem is when this is run on ubuntu 14.04. I am not sure if it is an ubuntu problem.

• As per the trace log above the int() function has encounterd some float value which is causing the exception at the end of log.But the contents of my dot files does not contain any float value, so how come the trace shows ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '206.05'?

Any clue will be helpful.

Answer 1

looks like a bug in the version of the tool included in the newest Ubuntu:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xdot/+bug/1317688

Answer 2

This is a bug in latest ubuntu xdot package, please use xdot in pip repository:

sudo apt-get remove xdot sudo pip install xdot