532384 - Special characters in JS cause debugger to fail

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Other Applications Graveyard :: Venkman JS Debugger, defect)

Description

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

I had the following line in my JS:

/* Copyright © 2009 privacychoice LLC */

I couldn't view the source file in Venkman.

It brought up a XUL error that I couldn't completely see.

This was debugging an extension.

Comment 1

[James Ross]

I can't reproduce this in "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5" with "Venkman version 0.9.87.4" using a single, simple HTML file with a <script> containing that comment.

This was being a little odd though:
 - Windows-1252: diamond "?" in Vnk source view, "©" in interactive session.
 - UTF-8 (w/ and w/o BOM): "©" in Vnk source view, "©" in interactive session.

Is your script inline or external, and what encoding are the HTML and JS files (including meta tag)?

Comment 2

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Actually the extension I am debugging is on AMO with the bad char, so you can debug it directly:

Trackerwatcher - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14454

Here's what I did to recreate.

Fresh 3.6 beta 4 profile.
install venkman 0.9.87.4.
Install trackerwatcher from above URL.

Open venkman.
Exclude browser files.
Try to open trackerwatcher.js

Here's what I get:

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: x-jsd:source?location=chrome%3A%2F%2Ftrackerwatcher%2Fcontent%2Ftrackerwatcher.js&instance=39
Line Number 4, Column 65:<line><margin x='f'>   </margin><num>   1</num> <c>/* Copyright ©2009 privacychoice LLC */</c></line>
--------------------------------------------------------------

Comment 3

[James Ross]

As discussed on IRC, this appears to work fine (excepting the "?" display which is expected) in Firefox 3.5 but not in 3.6. No idea what would've changed there, though.

Comment 4

[James Ross]

In case it's not obvious from the comments, the script file is encoded in ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252 or similar, and Venkman expects UTF-8 by default. http://www.hacksrus.com/~ginda/venkman/faq/venkman-faq.html#2.21 has a method to give it a better hint.

The bug here is that instead of showing an unknown character ("?"), it's actually failing to load the source view at all.