Re: [Lynx-dev] peculiar bug seen lynx 2.8.7dev.5

[Thomas Dickey]

On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 10:34:37AM -0500, Virden, Larry W. wrote:
> 
> This week I was on http://wiki.tcl.tk/20291 and ran into a frustrating
> problem.
> 
> After getting on the page, I selected the Edit link. I went into the
> text entry portion of the edit. I selected the "edit in my own editor"
> (which is nvi).
> 
> I added 4 lines at the bottom of the page. I saved the page.  Here's
> the diff that I see when I look at what actually went back through lynx
> to the web server. I ran a gdiff -bw -U1 on the files, so you won't
> see the thousands of lines that lynx changed the white spacing on...
> What you will see, though are the lines of text that were damaged
> after lynx wrote the text out...
> 
> Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this sort of thing?

Not entirely.  The conversion of tabs to spaces is of course because
this sort of use was not contemplated when the textarea editing was
implemented ~1999.

Aside from that, and lynx's ensuring that the textarea ends with
a blank line, I'm not seeing a problem with a quick check
here

        http://wiki.tcl.tk/_edit/17987

(It hadn't occurred to me earlier that _anyone_ could edit this ;-)

> I have no idea whether this is repeatable behavior or not. Once
> damage has been identified, I try to change browsers so as not
> to continue creating chaos.

well, if it's repeatable, I should be able to repeat it on a test page -
if nothing else, by pulling in the whole content of whatever version
you're trying to edit, and doing the same sort of edit.  (Looking at
the webpage, though - it doesn't seem that it saves old versions - does
it?)

The code in lynx that's doing the tab conversion is HText_ExtEditForm()
in src/GridText.c - which is reasonably self-contained.  Lynx probably
doesn't have any existing code for rendering tab characters, so it's
not simply a case of modifying that part of the code.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net