HTML editor randomly replaces blanks with letter n

[Jo]

Hi all,

this is a rather wacky problem, and I don't even know where to begin looking!

The symptom is already described in the Subject: HTML Nugget replaces blank spaces with a lower-case 'n', seemingly at random.
I have checked but didn't find any rhyme nor reason to the places where the blanks get replaced. Most occurrences are where an <a href...> is changed to <anhref...>, but I found one case where a target="_blank" attribute was replaced by ntarget="_blank", one where we got <imgnsrc="http://...">, and alt="Wallys Photoshop Tutorial" turned to alt="WallysnPhotoshop Tutorial". Text outside of HTML tags seems to be unaffected.
The JavaScript console didn't report any errors.

s9y version: 0.8.2
Active sidebar plugins: inside, Powered By, Blog Administration, Categories, Quicksearch, outside, Syndicate This Blog, Archives.
Event plugins: Markup: Serendipity, Markup: Emoticate, Markup: NL2BR, Spam Protector, Spartacus, Sample!, HTML Link Metatags, [HTML Nugget on Page], HTML Nugget on Page Top, Markup: Wordwrap long text, Highlight search queries, HTML validator, Creative Commons License, Export Blog as PDF, Statistics, Fix common XHTML errors.

Browsers: Mozilla 1.7.8, Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.218.XPSP_SP2_GDR.050301-1519.

Anybody got an idea?

Please respond to jo@durchholz.org .

Thanks!

[garvinhicking]

To me it seems that the wordwrap plugin can be causing this.

You can get a "n" inserted if the parsing of a "\n" newline somehow fails.

Can you try to reproduce this with less event plugins? Does the error only happen in HTML Nuggets or also in the Entry editing? Does the error also happen without WYSIWYG editing?

Regards,
Garvin

[Guest]

I'm trying to answer the questions as good as I can.

You can get a "n" inserted if the parsing of a "\n" newline somehow fails.

Yes, that occurred to me, too. (After I had sent off the post, of course...)

Does the error only happen in HTML Nuggets or also in the Entry editing?

Also during entry editing.

Does the error also happen without WYSIWYG editing?

Yes. In fact that was the first thing I turned off.

Can you try to reproduce this with less event plugins?

I'll try that the week after next week. (I'm off for a week early tomorrow, so I can't do a full test suite right now.)

Hope this helps with diagnosing the issue. It's really annoying, particularly when it hits HTML code.

I don't even get where those line breaks come from. Wordwrap is the obvious suspect, but the details point elsewhere. For example, I just had this text:

Die Karte wird auch als Pope oder Papst bezeichnet.
<br><br>

<img width='148' height='220' style="float: left; border: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px;" src="/anamcara/uploads/crowleyhierophant.serendipityThumb.jpg" alt="" />Bei Aleister Crowley

where it would turn the <img width...> tag into an <img nwidth...> one - and that's a position that's not really prone to word wrapping (wordwrap seems to apply just to comments and such, is it relevant at all?). Eliminating the empty line would remove the 'n' before 'width'... which also seems to point away from wordwrap.

There's another strange behavior at work here: there are two <img...> tags in the text. They have exactly the same attribute order (i.e. width-height-style-src-alt, and the same style attributes). However, when seen from the browser, the first image looks like <img style="float: left; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px;" src="/anamcara/uploads/waitehierophant.serendipityThumb.gif" alt="" height="220" width="127">, the second like <img style="border: 0px none ; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px;" src="/anamcara/uploads/crowleyhierophant.serendipityThumb.jpg" alt="" height="220" width="148">. Even more strangely, the first word after the second image ("Bei") has a line break after the B (only in the HTML source, the text displays OK and doesn't even have a blank after the B - which makes me wonder how reliable Mozilla's DOM Source view is...).

If this doesn't make much sense to you: neither does it to me...

Regards,
Jo

[garvinhicking]

Hm, this is all very strange. My only guess is that an event plugin is interfering. So if you can remove the nl2br and wordwrap event plugins temporarily, that should give us some clues.

For viewing source you shouldn'T use the DOM rendered source, but the simple view source, that should get you unmodified results.

Regards,
Garvin

[Guest]

Hi,

sorry for the late reply, I've been away for a week.

Hm, this is all very strange. My only guess is that an event plugin is interfering. So if you can remove the nl2br and wordwrap event plugins temporarily, that should give us some clues.

Done.

Wordwrap might have been installed or not, what I found was "Textformatierung: Texte umbrechen" (sounds as if it's the German version of wordwrap).

Curiously enough, it said "n" for "Welches Zeichen für Zeilenumbrüche nehmen" ("Use what character for line ends"). Entering "\n" and clicking on Submit would give "n"; entering "\\n" and clicking on Submit would give "\n". IOW there's a quote error in that field

BTW the field texts for that plugin had me confused. It's unclear (at least to me) whether they refer to the texts *before* or *after* any replacements have been done. (This may be a problem of the German translation, I don't have easy access to an English installation.)

Regards,
Jo

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Okay, that's a nasty "\\" error then. It might have to do with your server config and magic quotes, because then s9y strips the backslashes. Hrrrm.

Which text do you mean is unspecific? I don't know what you mean - you can write it to me in german. I don't see any "replacement" option in that plugin's description?!

Regards,
Garvin

[Guest]

Okay, that's a nasty "" error then. It might have to do with your server config and magic quotes, because then s9y strips the backslashes. Hrrrm.

Anything I could/should do? (We have full access to the machine.)

Which text do you mean is unspecific? I don't know what you mean - you can write it to me in german. I don't see any "replacement" option in that plugin's description?!

Well, wordwrap is obviously doing some replacements in the character stream - supposedly it turns blanks to line breaks or something. That's the "replacement" I was referring to.

I'll have a look at the plugin and do a write-up of the various texts and tell what exactly I don't understand about them.

Regards,
Jo

[garvinhicking]

Yes, disable magic_quotes_gpc in your php.ini. But make sure all other applications you have running don't depend on this. Usually magic_quotes makes more problems than it solves, so it shoudl be okay to disable them.

Well, wordwrap is obviously doing some replacements in the character stream - supposedly it turns blanks to line breaks or something. That's the "replacement" I was referring to.

Yes, I thought "wordwrap" (Zeilenumbruch) is a usual term for that action.

I'll have a look at the plugin and do a write-up of the various texts and tell what exactly I don't understand about them.

Yes, please do so, I'll then see what I can do.

Regards,
Garvin

[Guest]

Yes, disable magic_quotes_gpc in your php.ini.

It's off already.

Try http://shaman-ca.de/Main/HomePage?action=phpinfo to see all PHP settings.

Regards,
Jo

[Jo]

I've been told that switching off wordwrap will stop the random 'n' insertions. (Unsurprisingly