MadCap Software Forums

I recently had an issue with my builds failing because of the dreaded Surrogate Pair error message. Thought I would offer my scenario in hopes it may help others too down the road.

During project comparison (the restored commit vs. the one that would fail), I found a solution by happenstance, and I really don’t understand it. The surrogate issue was resolved when I deleted the Alias and header files. I open the Alias and deleted all references, and then generated identifiers again. Then I would build and it would fail. When I removed the file completely, builds work fine.

What would cause the Alias file to cause such an error? When I searched for 0xD83D, results always pointed me to a malformed Unicode character somewhere in my CSS or topics.

The 0xD83D error message needs to be modified to at least point users in a few directions they could check. I wasted two days going through my code looking for a Unicode character, and that wasn't even the issue. For me, it was the alias file. I guess it got corrupt somehow? That's why I deleted all the entries and regenerated them.

Jim

A cursory google search suggests this error may be due to an invalid space in an xml tag i.e. <tag > instead of <tag>, but this is just best guess.

UPDATE 21 June 2024:
Disregard my original post below. The error is not related to the Alias file as I thought. I finally found the Unicode characters in a file in my project (manually, I might add, but that time also permitted me to clean up a little here and there along the way). The Unicode characters were actually in two text files I have in my project. After removing those characters (and leaving the Alias as-is), builds are back to normal.

Apologies for any confusion I may have caused in our community.

Jim