385421 - clipboard encoding is incorrect

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Plugins Graveyard :: Java (Sun), defect)

Description

[Doug South]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.3 (Ubuntu-feisty)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.3 (Ubuntu-feisty)

We have a client reporting issues with copying from Firefox and pasting into our Java based editor (whereas they do not have an issue with Konqueror). I've confirmed this issue and have had a detailed look at the character stream that is being delivered via the TransferHandler in Java.

The first two bytes appear to be the BOM for UTF-16, big-endian (http://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#BOM), but the data in the stream appears every 4th byte, which messes up the de-encoding in the reader.

So instead of:

<h2 class="r">,

we get:
< h 2   c l a s s = " r " > 

(would you believe that I can't paste into this text field what I'm getting in Java? :) There are square characters in the extra spaces, but like I said, I can't paste it in...)

The beginning of the stream is:

fe, ff, ff, fd, ff, fd, 0, 60, 0, 0, 0, 104, 0, 0, 0, 50

from the 8th byte on, every fourth byte is what we would be expecting ("<h2..."). It looks like this might be in UTF-32 encoding? Since this works from Konqueror correctly into Java, I believe this is a Firefox specific issue.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Highlight text in browser
2. Paste into a Java application (http://www.ephox.com/products/editlive/demo/start.html, for example)
Actual Results:  
highlight text is pasted, but interlaced with square (extra) characters

Expected Results:  
Text should be pasted without the extra characters

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

do you see this problem also in version 3.5 or newer?

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan]

reproducible Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b3) Gecko/20100805 Firefox/4.0b3

Comment 3

[Dave Hay]

I've reproduced this on Firefox 3.6.12 on Linux: -

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101027 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.12

I've also reproduced it on Firefox 3.6.12 OSX 10.6.4, but don't have the user.agent string to hand :-(

Comment 4

[Julien]

It seems to be still an issue with Firefox 16.0.2.

Comment 5

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Closing old bugs in the Plugins component. We aren't going to track issues in 3rd-party plugins in the Mozilla bug tracker. In addition, support for NPAPI plugins will be removed at the end of this year; for more details see the post at https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/

If there is a serious bug in Firefox, it needs to be filed in the "Core" product, "Plug-Ins" component.