This has to be one of the weirdest problems I've ever ran into, but it's a serious one nonetheless. Last year I installed FCKeditor on one of my clients websites. Everything worked fine ... client was more then gratefull for the added functionality / usability that FCKeditor provided. Two weeks ago however he mailed that the editor failed to process a particular text. First thing I could think of, was there might be some kind of freak character in the text, causing problems. There wasn't. So I began eliminating text and resubmitting x number of times. In the end it turned out that the word "posters" in a specific paragraph was causing trouble. If I deleted it, the text was accepted. If not, the editor would just sit there and do nothing ... or my browser would simply show a "connection reset etc." page after a while.
At that point I thought it could have been some kind of bug that had been fixed ever since ... the site was still running a somewhat older version of the editor.
That being said, I developed a new CMS-backend for another customer a few weeks back. Again FCKeditor was the editor of choice and again it worked flawlessly. However, earlier today one of the site's editor mails me a particular text he had written wasn't being processed at all. I asked him to mail me the text, so I could have a look at it. Before I even managed to do that, he let me know he had been digging around himself and found out the origin of the problem was the word "postergallerijen" (it's not an english text so ...) in his text.
I refuse to believe that a single word could cause such problems ... but I'm clueless as to what could be the source of the problem. Especially given the fact that 2 totally independent sources, on different servers, with different versions of FCKeditor are reporting this problem.
Anyone have any brilliant ideas as to how this could be fixed and even more importantly: why this is happening ?
Thanks in advance.
At that point I thought it could have been some kind of bug that had been fixed ever since ... the site was still running a somewhat older version of the editor.
That being said, I developed a new CMS-backend for another customer a few weeks back. Again FCKeditor was the editor of choice and again it worked flawlessly. However, earlier today one of the site's editor mails me a particular text he had written wasn't being processed at all. I asked him to mail me the text, so I could have a look at it. Before I even managed to do that, he let me know he had been digging around himself and found out the origin of the problem was the word "postergallerijen" (it's not an english text so ...) in his text.
I refuse to believe that a single word could cause such problems ... but I'm clueless as to what could be the source of the problem. Especially given the fact that 2 totally independent sources, on different servers, with different versions of FCKeditor are reporting this problem.
Anyone have any brilliant ideas as to how this could be fixed and even more importantly: why this is happening ?
Thanks in advance.
Re: Editor freezes on particular word in particular context
Re: Editor freezes on particular word in particular context
I'd think encoding problems would also cause problems on more then just that word. It's just plain weird.
Re: Editor freezes on particular word in particular context
I can tell you that this has nothing to do with the editor. The editor merely manipulates the HTML and the browser deals with character encoding and form submission. You can verify this by disabling the editor and submitting the same text using the underlying <textarea>. Your best choice is to use a debug HTTP proxy to monitor the traffic and see what exactly is being submitted. This will allow you to see the actual text sent to the web server and all control information, such as content length, character encoding, etc. Make sure to use a real debug proxy, not one of those web-based ones.
Re: Editor freezes on particular word in particular context
Captured the HTTP-stream with Wireshark ... and can't find anything that looks weird or out of place.

After a lot of "Googling" it turns out it might be a problem with PHP and the way it handles sessions in version 4.x (I use 5.x on all my test-servers ...) I guess my clients should try to "persuade" their host to move to PHP 5.
The script actually never gets around to processing the form data ... it freezes or hangs way before that