Dirty Filthy Text

[Mr C]

Thought I should post an experience I had with using EasySync (which I love by the way), and pasted text containing hidden characters, that can cause an issue with synchronized data.

 

The issue observed ::

Upon doing an initial sync, I noticed some fields in the recipient db had text in fields that did not correspond with that in the master database.

Looking at the master data, I noticed a "notes" field contained text that looked like it was pasted from another source (in most fields I control the text input, cleaning it to remove things like, formating and spaces and returns at the end of single line data fields).

This "notes" text was part of the data that was ending up in fields it should not have been in, so that was where I started.

 

I then copied the text into my favourite text editor (currently TextWrangler), and noticed an upsidedown ? in the spot where line returns should have been, and these were in the spot where the text was breaking up, and ending up in the wrong fields.

Using the FileMaker Data Viewer, I pasted the character into a ' Code ( "?" ) ' calculation [ ? = copied/pasted text ], this showed the Value to be 8232. The following calculation ' Substitute ( NoteText ; Char ( 8232 ) ; Char ( 13 ) ) ' when run on the text fixed the problem. All following sync's put the data into the correct fields.

 

Conclution ::

The text turned out to have been copied from an email recieved. The ' Char (8232) ' characters were the line returns in the email text.

So it would appear some characters can cause undesirable effects in EasySync. I have since put the calculation into a text cleaning function, applied to multiline text fields in the db.

It would also be good if anyone with better knowledge of the internal workings of EasySync, could enlighten me (us) to what other characters could cause problems, they could be added to the text cleaning function.

 

Best Regards

Mark Chettle

Australia

 

 

[timdietrich]

Mark --

 

I believe that what you are seeing is more of an issue with how FileMaker's ExecuteSQL handles (or doesn't handle) certain characters. From what I've seen, it can occur both when the data contains certain characters, and in cases where the SQL itself has certain hidden chars.

 

Unfortunately, I don't have a list of the characters that cause this issue.

 

-- Tim