Asterisks in notices via API

lindahljohn

On an in-house install of 0.8.3, the web is working fine but we see asterisks in notice messages via the API (both with Twhirl client and XML from the API directly). Only characters "c", "p", and "s" seem to be affected.

9 months ago, someone else reported this issue: http://bit.ly/bubj2t but I find no other reports so it must be a configuration issue rather than a bug.

Any ideas?

grimm26

I just ran into the same issue. There are newlines surrounding your shortened URLs. You need to modify function common_shorten_url() in lib/util.php to return trim($short_url); instead of just return $short_url;

lindahljohn

Thanks grimm26 but that didn't fix it. Anyone else?

zcopley

@lindahljohn Your version of PHP was compiled against and older version of the PCRE library, which does't grok some of the regular expressions that StatusNet uses. You can either recompile your version PHP or modify common_xml_safe_str($str) (in lib/util.php) to strip out control chars and UTF-16 surrogate chars via a different regular expression.

lindahljohn

Thanks @zcopley! That fixed it and some other issues we had. I guess the Red Hat distribution didn't have the right PCRE version.

brionv

Aho... we should be able to add a test for the PCRE thing to the installer for the next point release. At least that err finally makes sense to me! :D

aric

@brionv this ever make it into the installer?

brionv

@aric yes this is in the installer for testing & 0.9.x branches, so will be in 0.9.1 release when it comes.