Does not work with Python 3.4

[aherbjornsen]

I'm trying to get this to work with python3 (currently 3.4) but can't seem to get it to work.

I receive this message:

$ python3
Python 3.4.2 (default, Oct 19 2014, 13:31:11) 
[GCC 4.9.1] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pynsca
>>> from pynsca import NSCANotifier
>>> notif = NSCANotifier("nagios")
>>> notif.svc_result("localhost", "testservice", pynsca.OK, "OK: testing")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/root/pynsca.py", line 181, in svc_result
    buf += data
TypeError: Can't convert 'bytes' object to str implicitly
>>> 

[djmitche]

@kislik I know you did some work to make pynsca work with Python 3. Is this something you could fix?

[aherbjornsen]

My knowledge of Python is very rudimentary, but I did some googling and found that the socket.recv call now returns a binary array and not a string.
I did try to add '.decode()' to the 'buf+=data' line, but that did only give an error about unknown format. I also tried to change the 'buf = '' ' line to 'buf = b''' which got rid of the initial problem but brought on other instead...
Also there's a few other bits that needs to be changed. 'itertools.izip' should now probably only be 'zip'. And 'isinstance(text, unicode)' should probably be replaced by 'isinstance(text, str)'.

[djmitche]

Indeed, it's not trivial to fix this to work with Python 3. There are some migration guides out there, though.

I would suggest using bytes for everything in this particular application, as I think the NSCA protocol is not encoding-aware.