I just don't know how this got here... :-(
```
def normalize_description(self, description):
r"""Try to re-decode ``description`` as UTF-16, as this is a somewhat common
mistake that causes issues in the database because of null bytes in JSON.
>>> NpmMapping().normalize_description("foo bar")
'foo bar'
>>> NpmMapping().normalize_description(
... "\ufffd\ufffd#\x00 \x00f\x00o\x00o\x00 \x00b\x00a\x00r\x00\r\x00 \x00"
... )
'foo bar'
>>> NpmMapping().normalize_description(
... "\ufffd\ufffd\x00#\x00 \x00f\x00o\x00o\x00 \x00b\x00a\x00r\x00\r\x00 "
... )
'foo bar'
>>> NpmMapping().normalize_description(
... # invalid UTF-16 and meaningless UTF-8:
... "\ufffd\ufffd\x00#\x00\x00\x00 \x00\x00\x00\x00f\x00\x00\x00\x00"
... ) is None
True
>>> NpmMapping().normalize_description(
... # ditto (ut looks like little-endian at first)
... "\ufffd\ufffd#\x00\x00\x00 \x00\x00\x00\x00f\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00"
... ) is None
True
>>> NpmMapping().normalize_description(None) is None
True
"""
if description is None:
return None
# XXX: if this function ever need to support more cases, consider
# switching to https://pypi.org/project/ftfy/ instead of adding more hacks
if description.startswith("\ufffd\ufffd") and "\x00" in description:
# 2 unicode replacement characters followed by '# ' encoded as UTF-16
# is a common mistake, which indicates a README.md was saved as UTF-16,
# and some NPM tool opened it as UTF-8 and used the first line as
# description.
description_bytes = description.encode()
# Strip the the two unicode replacement characters
assert description_bytes.startswith(b"\xef\xbf\xbd\xef\xbf\xbd")
description_bytes = description_bytes[6:]
# If the following attempts fail to recover the description, discard it
# entirely because the current indexer storage backend (postgresql) cannot
# store zero bytes in JSON columns.
description = None
if not description_bytes.startswith(b"\x00"):
# try UTF-16 little-endian (the most common) first
try:
description = description_bytes.decode("utf-16le")
except UnicodeDecodeError:
pass
if description is None:
# if it fails, try UTF-16 big-endian
try:
description = description_bytes.decode("utf-16be")
except UnicodeDecodeError:
pass
if description is None:
# if it fails, try UTF-16 big-endian
try:
description = description_bytes.decode("utf-16be")
except UnicodeDecodeError:
pass
if description:
if description.startswith("# "):
description = description[2:]
return description.rstrip()
return description
```