250908 - Bad character in abook.mab messes up address book entry, and can't be fixed by edit UI

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Address Book & Contacts, defect)

Description

[Ian Graham]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616

I have an address book entry that has somehow become corrupted: the relevant
string in abook.mab is:

... (28E=Ross)(28F=Thomson)(269
    =$[e-mail])(26B=352-988-3807)(26E=Clermont) ... 

Note the $0A at the beginning of the email address.

As a result I am unable to properly edit this address book entry: strings
magically disappear and reappear in the edit widget, and whatever I do I can't
seem get rid of the bogus character.

I'd be happy to send the full address book to someone working on the bug -- but
for obvious reasons am reluctant to attach the entire thing to this bug report
:-;  I will attach a graphic showing what the UI fields looks like given the
current entry value 

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. 
2.
3.




I can provide the abook.mab to someone working on the bug and willing to keep
the book private.

Comment 1

[Ian Graham]

Attachment: Two GIFs showing how the bad entry displays in the address book UI

The images are annotated to show where things look weird (although it should be
pretty obvious).

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Ian, thanks for the test record you provided in test.ldif. 
I tested TB 1.5 (20051201), TB2 alpha, TB trunk and SM trunk rv:1.9a3pre) Gecko/20070314 SeaMonkey/1.5a  I can edit on all versions. 

After import 
- in TB2 I see the $0A
- in TB and SM trunk I don't see the $0A

On TB1.5 and TB2 as soon as I edit the record the $0 appears to be gone/not visible.

So the behavior has changed over time and for me is WFM on trunk.  I could swear this is a dupe but I can't find it. Perhaps I'm thinking of Netscape or a different product!  But why you can't edit the card in TB 1.5.10 I don't know

cc: Neil at mcow's suggestion

Comment 3

[Ian Graham]

Actually, thanks to you Wayne for taking the trouble to pursue this.

In fact I too can edit the test record on TB 1.5, and doing so deletes the bad character. 

I just hadn't tried to do so in such a long time ... got used to ignoring it, I guess. 

So I will close this as WFM 

Comment 4

[[e-mail]]

The $0A is probably a newline character. Most XUL widgets can't display newlines properly, while textboxes depend on a preference which by default on Windows truncates the newline and any following text.