[BUG] python3.10 spec.get_string_attribute() throws a runtime exception with non-utf-8 string headers

[voodoonofx]

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Describe the bug

When looping over all key/value pairs in an EXR header using the python bindings to OpenImageIO, a field containing 0xFF values causes an awkward RuntimeError: Could not allocate string object!. This is very commonly seen in DI when the upstream writing tool doesn't want to set a value and instead just fills it with some default of 0xFF.

To Reproduce With the following header (as shown with iinfo -a -v):

    AudioFramerate: 24
    AudioInfo: "������������������������������������������������������������������������@"
    AudioRunningLTC: "MOS"

Where the � character is 0xFF.

Attempting to iterate over headers like so:

>>> import OpenImageIO  as oiio
>>> src = oiio.ImageBuf('./my_file.1000.exr')
>>> spec = src.spec()
>>> for a in spec.extra_attribs:
...   print(f'{a.name} ({a.type}): {a.value} ({type(a.value)})')

Causes the following exception:

AudioFileName (string):  (<class 'str'>)
AudioFramerate (float): 24.0 (<class 'float'>)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
RuntimeError: Could not allocate string object!

Expected behavior It appears that strings are assumed to be in utf-8 unicode, which causes an error trying to decode non-unicode data into a python string.

The workaround is to not access a.value and instead ask for the attribute directly like so:

>>> try:
...   x = spec.get_string_attribute('AudioInfo')
... except RuntimeError:
...   pass

However, I was hoping to have a more graceful exception of this error. For example, I cannot access the raw bytes of this value to determine if the offending field is actually usable. Perhaps adding an a.raw_value could return the information in the field as a bytestring so the above try/except has an opportunity to do something else special with the value. Since the accessing of an attribute here is forcing the coercion to unicode, I cannot get to the original data using python in any way.

Platform information:

• OIIO branch/version: openimageio-2.4.5.0-r0
• OS: Alpine Linux 3.17 under Docker
• C++ compiler:
• Any non-default build flags when you build OIIO:

[voodoonofx]

To work around this, I just switched to using spec.get_bytes_attribute(), and then attempting my own string conversions.

However, the python get_string_attribute should still not fail egregiously even if the underlying value cannot be parsed as a string. Perhaps just raising the UnicodeDecodeError directly would allow a try/except to catch this rather than the much more generic RuntimeError