[pmwiki-users] Something (possibly the sqlite recipe) seems to have trouble with UTF-8 in wikilinks

[Petko Yotov]

On Tuesday 21 August 2012 18:16:25 Alex Eftimiades wrote:
> The reason I suggested the sqlite recipe might be at fault was
> because I remember the utf-8 characters working fine before I
> installed the sqlite recipe. Then a lot of characters got converted to
> �. This however might have been because of a bad conversion process
> rather than the sqlite recipe. 
....
> My only solution was to manually edit the pages as they came up. I did not
> bother mentioning

I'm sorry to hear that -- but if your site was already working fine in UTF-8, 
and running a recent version of PmWiki, the migration to SQLite shouldn't have 
caused the lost characters.

I say it shouldn't, but if it did, I'd want to experience the same problem and 
fix it. And if you haven't deleted your original wiki.d files, it is 
certainily possible to recover your characters.

> I tried enabling diagnostics, and there seems to be a problem in the
> sqlite.php recipe at line 162. That is where extra attributes are
> deserialized during the page read process, so it seems to suggest that
> there is something messed up during the deserialization of the extra
> page attributes.
...
> I also realized that the messages
> were warnings on wrong datatypes in the foreach() statement at the
> deserialization stage, so I would not be surprised if a lot of people
> have that warning message due to type juggling.

What extra page attributes do you have? No other people have come to tell me 
that they have this problem, but probably not many admins use the recipe. 

If your pages have extra attributes and the unserialize() function returns an 
error, I'm not sure how to fix that. Are your extra attributes just 
key=>string pairs ? 

> So after switching the include statements, my problem has become
> disappearing page actions.

In your Site.PageActions you have many (:if auth XXX:) blocks. I only see the 
actions "print" and "logout", but probably my username doesn't have the 
permissions to see the other actions.

I would love to help you better, but on the servers where I can test it, it 
works fine, I don't see the bug. If you can give more information about your 
installation (other recipes, config.php, Pmwiki version...), hopefully I'll be 
able to reproduce the bug and investigate it in real time.

OTOH, it seems that you are using some of the most complex recipes like 
WikiSh, WikiPublisher and AuthProfile. I must admit that I wouldn't have the 
time right away to review those recipes if there is/was some conflict there.

Here is how I operate when I search for a bug:

- I try to disable all recipes and settings one after another, and every time 
I check to see if the problem has gone away. If it goes away, it is likely 
that the setting I just disabled had some conflict.

- If I didn't find the problem, I'll try the other way around -- I install 
PmWiki in a clean directory of the server, and I gradually enable settings and 
recipes, while testing if it works or not. When it breaks, it is likely that 
the last enabled setting caused the conflict.

- Then, in order to understand the problem, I edit the scripts and test them 
in real time -- interrupting and interrogating the program with such snippets:

  die("MyVariable: '$MyVariable', should be 'AB.CD'.");

And hopefully, at some point I understand the bug/problem, then I can fix it.

Petko