Forum Reply Fail

Lt. Sniper · Post by **Lt. Sniper** » 15 January 07 8:55 pm

I have come across this problem a few times before, I dont know whats causing it but I go to do a reply and I get a PHP error.

Example as follows:
(acctually, it wont even let me copy and paste the error in here)

This is the last part of the message:
Error in posting

DEBUG MODE

INSERT INTO phpbb_posts_text (post_id, post_subject, bbcode_uid, post_text) VALUES (74512, '', 'ba2ad111a6', '....

Line : 280
File : /var/www/au_com_geocaching_forum/docroot/includes/functions_post.php

Damo. · Post by **Damo.** » 15 January 07 10:04 pm

Are you cut'n'pasting from word or another program? It's been mentioned before on the forum that it adds some hidden formatting tags which can muck it up.

Post by **caughtatwork** » 15 January 07 11:00 pm

Specifically it seems to be malformed hypens (which aren't actually hypens).
Try and remove them and see if it works.

Lt. Sniper · Post by **Lt. Sniper** » 15 January 07 11:13 pm

Thanks for that guys

I was using word and it was the apostrophes that caused the issues

Post by **caughtatwork** » 15 January 07 11:14 pm

OK, now that's two things.
Apostrophes and hyphens.
Damn WORD. Piece o' crap.

Bunya · Post by **Bunya** » 16 January 07 9:34 am

I gave up using cut and paste from Word after earlier problems.

However, I got the same error just doing a cut and paste from a geocaching log.
I think that was a problem with apostrophes and/or quotation marks.
Even retyping these didn't fix it.

setsujoku · Post by **setsujoku** » 29 January 07 10:08 pm

yep im having the same problem. im trying to paste in an e-mail from outlook into a reply, and even when i remove all of the commas and appostraphies it still returns a debug error

Cached · Post by **Cached** » 29 January 07 10:09 pm

paste into notepad, then cut and paste again into gca, that should cut out anything nasty.

setsujoku · Post by **setsujoku** » 29 January 07 10:11 pm

Cached wrote:paste into notepad, then cut and paste again into gca, that should cut out anything nasty.

nope even tried that as well.

even tried removing all the punctuation in notepad and pasting it in, but still no luck

it has a numbered list in it that was generated in outlook(which uses word for its editor) so im wondering if that might be the problem

Chwiliwr · Post by **Chwiliwr** » 29 January 07 10:28 pm

setsujoku wrote:
Cached wrote:paste into notepad, then cut and paste again into gca, that should cut out anything nasty.
nope even tried that as well.

even tried removing all the punctuation in notepad and pasting it in, but still no luck

it has a numbered list in it that was generated in outlook(which uses word for its editor) so im wondering if that might be the problem

Its possible that the text still has something in it even with a paste into notepad.

Windows sometimes is smart/dumb enough to keep some things within notepad until the save so perhaps try saving the text in notepad itself and then open it up again and then copy it to wherever.

I had a similar problem at work a while ago where a special tab character was kept for some reason until I save it within notepad.

The IT people think that it was windows copying from the clipboard (the original copy) not notepad that caused it to happen.

The Ginger Loon · Post by **The Ginger Loon** » 29 January 07 10:57 pm

Just to throw extra confusion to the issue (*sorry*), I had the same problem a week or so ago, except that the post I was trying to submit was created entirely using the GCA features.

I was trying to quote a previous poster and add another quote from scratch as well as add a hyperlink to an external site, but it kept throwing up an *error* in line 280.

I even tried copying the post out of the GCA text editor and putting it into notepad and back into the GCA editor but to no avail.

In the end I gave up completely, rebooted by PC, logged back in and tried again, without the hyperlink and added quote.

I had it happen once before too, prolly about a year or so ago.

riblit · Post by **riblit** » 30 January 07 9:29 am

I have found that the so called "smart quotes" from Word persist across copy/paste operations to notepad and a multitude of other text processors. (They all use the same base control to implement the editor). I now manually replace the quotes(").

Bunya · Post by **Bunya** » 30 January 07 10:16 am

riblit wrote:I have found that the so called "smart quotes" from Word persist across copy/paste operations to notepad and a multitude of other text processors. (They all use the same base control to implement the editor). I now manually replace the quotes(").

Fair enough.

But I still don't see why we now can't do things we used to be able to do!

Can't these changes be desrever?

riblit · Post by **riblit** » 30 January 07 10:27 am

Bunya wrote:
riblit wrote:I have found that the so called "smart quotes" from Word persist across copy/paste operations to notepad and a multitude of other text processors. (They all use the same base control to implement the editor). I now manually replace the quotes(").
Fair enough.

But I still don't see why we now can't do things we used to be able to do!

Can't these changes be desrever?

There have been NO changes to the forum codebase or the underlying database. The apache webserver and the version of php it runs have been changed to later versions. This we can't do anything about as the site shares these applications with a number of other sites hosted on the same machine.
That upgrade may have caused the effect you see as checking is a lot stricter in the later code.

It is better not to pollute the database with the formatting rubbish Word puts out and use standard ascii chars with either bb or html tags for formatting.

If you must use Word you can strip its formatting by typing ctl-shift-z ( I think) after selection and before copying.

stealth_ninja_penguin · Post by **stealth_ninja_penguin** » 31 January 07 7:50 pm

I've tried all of the above (including Notepad) and still no good. I either need to get a masters in computer programming or write a post in the box. Has anyone got any other ideas on how to get text from Word to the message body box without creating an error message?