156893 - Adding a Bookmark with a strange character in the title corrupts the bookmarks file

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Camino Graveyard :: Bookmarks, defect)

Description

[Evan Jones]

This is related to Bug #154698 (After importing bad bookmarks file, all
bookmarks are lost).

Problem: When adding a bookmark for a page that has strange characters in the
title, the bookmarks file will become corrupt.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to the site listed in the URL field
(http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix-win2000/invitedtalks/lucovsky_html/)
2. Add a bookmark. Note that the title reads "Windows A Software Engineering
Odyssey", but if you view the source, the title contains a "bad" character after
"Windows" (probably a TM symbol on Windows).
3. Quit Chimera.
4. Start Chimera. Notice that it will inform you that your bookmarks are
corrupt. The file will look exactly like the file as reported in bug #154698.

The problem: Chimera inserts the strange character in the XML file, which means
that it will fail to parse it.

Solution: Just strip out non printable characters from the title when adding
bookmarks (the title displays properly in the dialog, why is it incorrect in the
file?). Is this also a problem with Mozilla?

Tested with Chimera 0.3.1 (daily build from July 10th, 2002).

Comment 1

[Greg K.]

I think this is a duplicate.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 153263 ***

Comment 2

[Evan Jones]

Hmm... It isn't REALLY a duplicate, but I'll leave it as a duplicate and add my
comments to the other bug, because it is definately related. The other issue is
about UI, whereas this is *not* a UI problem. The bookmarks UI works fine in the
case outlined in this bug, however, it causes data corruption of the bookmarks
file which is not mentioned in bug #153263.

Comment 3

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

I am going to reopen this on the basis of the last comment. I agree that we
should never write out a bookmarks.xml file that cannot be read in again.

Comment 4

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Taking

Comment 5

[Greg K.]

Actually, you're right. Changing Severity to critical and adding dataloss.

Comment 6

[Brian Nesse (gone)]

notes from a poster on npm.macosx:

...I imported bookmarks and then Chimera stopped loading sites. I close Chimera,
restart it and it works fine. I dumped it and reinstalled thinking I might have
had a corrupt file. It installed fine again yet the same problem happens.
[snip]
I took at look at Chimera's (0.4) bookmarks.xml file. This file is obviously
munged. It starts off okay then has a LOT of <folder><bookmark> tags for the
last 50% of the file. I tried editing the file to get it to work but no go.
So, I trashed the file and then fired up Chimera. It made a new bookmark file
and it works fine. I have added new bookmarks and moved them around and the
munging doesn't happen. It happens when you import bookmarks. Once you import
bookmarks I tried from mozilla and Internet Explorer (5.2.1) and it munges the
bookmarks.xml file. Once you do that the browser doesn't work again unless you
close it and re-open it.

Comment 7

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

This is now fixed. You can import a bookmarks.html with bad characters init, and
we'll strip them out. Bookmarking a page with bad characters also strips them.

Comment 8

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

vrfy'd fixed using 2002.08.26.05 and the original test steps.