MadCap Software Forums

Hello,
I just created a new Flare project by importing a document from Word, however as I am adjusting the formatting/adding new text, I keep getting an error appear in a messages bar at the bottom of my screen that says "Found non-table cell inside table row", and this message prints out about 25 times at once. This is the first time I have observed this error, and this is also the first time however I have imported a file since the patch was installed last week, is this a known bug or is there a setting that I need to change in my project?
Thanks so much,
Katie

Hi again,
I think I may have found a solution, I re-created the project from the word file, but instead removed the TOC links and stripped down most of the formatting. The error hasn't appeared again in Flare.
Thanks,
Katie

I always try to strip as much formatting as I can before importing.

I've seen a similar thing on imported tables with merged cells - extra "phantom" columns were added outside the table proper. Seems like somewhere along the line the colspan and number of columns or cells got out of sync. Couldn't fix it in the XML editor so went into the code and removed the extra <td> tags (from memory).

I found that what existed was an extra space in my table headers I had "<th>XXXXXXX</th> <th>XXXXXXX</th>"

When I removed the space, the problem stopped.

For others who have this problem: I found that in my project I had a rogue table row without columns, which was causing this message.

Here is what my code had:
I removed that row and the message went away.

After all the years, this problem still persists. In some cases, some of the tricks above work, but in others they don't. The error message is far too vague.
There is probably no improvement in sight?

I had the same message 112 times for the same file, which contains 2 tables.

When I removed all indentation in Text Editor, the problem was solved. By indentation, I mean the tabs before the tags in every line.
This is what I had: This is the result, with no more messages such as 'Found non-table row inside table section' and 'Found non-table cell inside table row':
The indentation before <thead> and <tbody> are not an issue.

I hope this helps.

I wonder if it's related to some sort of non-printing character that Word adds, which Flare doesn't like. The number of posts saying removing all the white spaces fixes the issue suggests this might be the case. It might be possible to locate the offending characters using a text editor like Notepad++

That is a safe and proper assumption as you're dealing with output from an M$ product.

After importing, it's always nice to run the output through https://www.freeformatter.com/xml-validator-xsd.html

Just paste the file into the top text area (Option 1: Copy-paste your XML document here), and then click Validate XML. You don't need to add an XSD or any other settings. It uses the XSD link in our files for validation. That'll find the odd crap that pops up during an import. After validation, you can run it through their XML or HTML formatter if you start moving tags around.

I just did a huge doc set import and used freeformatter extensively. To find those oddball issues like the empty TR tags, if running it through the validator doesn't find it, cut out half the rows in the table, try the output. If it doesn't fail, then the cut lines contain the issue. If it failed, restore the cut lines and start chopping up the other half.

Just be careful that you don't inadvertently cut a tag pair in half

It is incredible how much can be resolved by pasting content into Notepad or Notepad++ and recopying it before pasting it somewhere else (even back into Word).

Isn't it? I learned early on to never directly paste from an M$ source doc into working doc without first putting the text through NPP to get rid of any stray garbage that word wanted to add.