235344 - Strings of >= 4096 non-whitespace characters are invisible in "view source"

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 237085

(Toolkit :: View Source, defect)

Description

[Henrik Thorburn]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

The interesting line is the <input type=hidden... When using "view page source",
it looks like this.
<input type="hidden" name="RoundObject" value=>
But, if you copy it to the clipboard, the whole value data is copied. Ie, it's 
hidden/invisible in the "view page souce" mode, but it's still there.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to URL http://www.thorburn.se/firefox.html
2. Rightclick, view page source (look at the hidden input named RoundObject)


Actual Results:  
3. It looks like the tag contains no value

Expected Results:  
4. It should have printed the value which is actually there.

Comment 1

[Wayne Woods]

Hi Henrik,

I can confirm this problem. 20040305 Firefox/0.8.0+, Mac OS X 10.2.8

I played with it a bit, and it seems that the only condition is that there needs
to be text of greater than 4095 non-whitespace characters in a row. At 4096
characters, that section of text becomes invisible in View->Page Source.

It seems this text can be anywhere in the html file. I'll attach a file next to
demonstrate that many characters in a row inside comment tags and also just
sitting on their own outside any tags.

This problem occurs on both Firefox and Mozilla Seamonkey. For the moment, I'll
leave the Product set as Firefox, as the view source code may have forked
between the two products. I'm hoping someone else can comment on this.

Won't get a chance to test this on Windows for a couple of days.

Possibly related to bug 203964 and bug 196144?

Comment 2

[Wayne Woods]

Attachment: Demonstrates the invisible string bug in View->Page Source

Load the attachment in a browser window.
Go to View->Page Source and observe that the sections with 4,096 Xs in a row
are invisible (can be copied and pasted though).
In the view source of different browsers (such as Safari or IE), the text is
visible.

Comment 3

[Steffen Wilberg]

-> view source.

Comment 4

[Sanjay Madhavan]

Attachment: Test case to show invisible text in a textarea input

The problem is not only in the view source but also in an input textarea. I
have attached a sample html file to reproduce the problem. 
Open the file in firefox 0.9.3 and then type one or more chars in the textarea
in the sql statement. Immediately the text becomes invisble.

Comment 5

[Wayne Woods]

Hi Sanjay,

I suspect your problem is a dupe of Mozilla bug 237085. It might share the same
root cause as this one, but I'm not certain.

Comment 6

[Matthew Westcott]

Attachment: Test case with a single-line PRE block

This effect also shows up with a PRE block containing 4096 or more characters
in a single line; this happens even if those 4096 characters contain
whitespace. In this situation, the text is missing from the rendered view, but
visible in "view source".

Comment 7

[Matthew Westcott]

Attachment: Test case with a single-line PRE block

This effect also shows up with a PRE block containing 4096 or more characters
in a single line; this happens even if those 4096 characters contain
whitespace. In this situation, the text is missing from the rendered view, but
visible in "view source". [Encountered on OS X 10.3.6, Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh;
U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0]

Comment 8

[quirxi]

We have got the same problem with firefox and mozilla on windows and linux.
It seems as if the textarea would cut any text above a 4 kilobyte boundary.
Maybe the internal buffer of the browser is not larger then 4k ?
We have tested it with IE and there we do not have that problem at all ...

Comment 9

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 293875 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

*** Bug 315029 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 320016 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Franz Erlendorf]

Hi, could please anyone begin to solve this bug!? It's still in Firefox 1.5.0.1. One cannot accurately edit the template of their blogger.com blog, because the textarea's text's too long.

Comment 13

[Wayne Woods]

Tobias,

Interesting. Most examples of this were in situations that were pretty rare. But if it commonly affects bloggers, then maybe it should be brought back into the spotlight.

However... from reading related bugs, it seems it's not dependent on the number of characters exactly, but rather a combination of number and text size: If you have a block of 'invisible' text, and decrease the text size enough times, it'll reappear (see bug 237085 comment 11). So hopefully you can still edit your blog temporarily by decreasing the text size (and perhaps using strong glasses ;) )

The earliest dupe I can find is bug 92193, but bug 237085 has the best attention and analysis, so I'll dupe this to that one and pursue things further there.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 237085 ***