A strange SAVE error

[alanandrew]

Hi all,

This is my first post. I have been using Flare for some time now and suddenly started experiencing a save error at intermittent times. To cure it before, I deleted the entire topic content and the save OK.

Now there is just too much work to re-do.

The error pops up this message:
=====================================================
Failed to run commmand 'Save'.

Exception:
The surrogate pair (0xDBC0,0xDBC0)is invalid .A high surrogate character (0xD800 - 0xDBFF) must always be
paired with a low surrogate character (0xDC00 - 0xDFFF).
=====================================================

Can anyone advise anything.

[alanandrew]

After a painstaking search through the topic, I tracked down the offending character. I found a square character between p tags - <p></p>. This was also mentiond in another error message indicating this character as an invalid character.

Now I've seen this before in a topic, although without errors, after I had copied some text from a PDF file.

I suppose this is a Flare bug of some sort.

[RamonS]

I agree, Flare should not accept invalid characters and ignore them. You can report it as a bug here: http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx
And welcome to the forums!

[KateAZ]

Is this still a bug? I got the same error. I have searched the code for an offending character and have not found one. I used CSE HTML Validator and got messages about the invalid use of "MadCap" case. However, that isn't a problem in other topics.

Suggestions?

[KateAZ]

This error prevents compling the WebHelp.
This string started in 2008. What is the fix for this?

Thank you.

[KateAZ]

In a bulleted list created through Flare, there were boxes in the code for the bullets. I deleted those and the WebHelp compiles.

[kevinmcl]

Mine was choking on some characters that had been in my help since Flare v1.1, but it only started the silly surrogate pair error a couple of months ago.

The new techwriter tracked it down, since he encountered the problem the first time he tried to publish his update of one of my help projects.

I had encountered the error, but only intermittently, and it went away for a while after I removed and re-installed both .NET and Flare 7.1.

So-o-o-o-o, my question is why does the problem happen only SOMEtimes, when the characters have been in the project (actually ALL my projects, since this was on my boiler-plate Disclaimer page...)? Things do not happen differently in software when the inputs are unchanged, unless the logic says so. Therefore, the logic of Flare must be to treat the identical characters as just fine under certain conditions, and as a show-stopping error under other conditions. Therefore: WHAT ARE THOSE CONDITIONS??

[program] Hmm. Bozo at the keyboard is asking to do something that he's done every couple of days for the past five years. Hmm. It's Monday afternoon, let him get away with it.

[program] Hmm. Bozo at the keyboard is asking to do something that he's done every couple of days for the past five years. Hmm. It's Tuesday morning or Wednesday around lunch time, stop him in his tracks. No Publish for you. Get out of my kitchen!

[program] Hmm. It smells like deadline time, around here. What's a really cool way to make "Publish" fail? Lemme see what's in my bag of obscure tricks...

... ahem...

- kevin (I do not anthropomorphize software... just programmers)