The letter 's' gets eaten by the WebCreateNewTopicTemplate!

Hi all,

I've got a rather strange problem on my Foswiki installation that is causing me a lot of pain!

In a nutshell - When people create a new topic using the WebCreateNewTopicTemplate, it completely ignores the letter 's'. All other letters are fine, but not 's'. It is very easy to reproduce, but I'm struggling to find a solution to the problem.

The workaround is to create a WikiLink in the page editor, then click on the '?' to create the page.

I first found this problem in version 1.1.4 after updating some extensions. Unfortunately, I didn't do any kind of staging, so I don't know which extension could have introduced the problem. After upgrading to 1.1.9, the problem has remained.

I have inspected the JavaScript files of both the 1.1.4 install (which I have preserved) and the 1.1.9 install and can see the Unicode for 's' present in the right place. I don't have the tools to put a breakpoint in when the text changes in the Create New Topic text box, so I can't step through the logic and see where the 's' disappears.

Does anyone have any idea how I can investigate this problem? Any help would be appreciated, as this is causing some chaos amongst my less-IT literate staff, who get completely confused!

best regards,

Charles

-- CharlesWilliams - 24 May 2014

There is some issue with the NameFilter regular expression set by bin/configure, and we have not found how it gets corrupted. The issue is that a \s (space) filter needs to be \\s. Did you install using the Debian or .rpm packages or a tar/zipfile extract. Also what platform are you running on? Linux, Windows, ...?

Check out the setting in your LocalSite.cfg

$Foswiki::cfg{NameFilter} = '[\\s\\*?~^\\$@%`"\'&;|<>\\[\\]#\\x00-\\x1f]';

make sure that the "s" has the double escape \ If you look in the configure interface, it will have a single slash, but it should be saved as above: It's an expert setting under the "Environment" tab. This is what it should look like in the configure UI.

[\s\*?~^\$@%`"'&;|<>\[\]#\x00-\x1f]

-- GeorgeClark - 24 May 2014

Your advice has helped to correct the problem.

I used the configure interface to reset the 'NameFilter' setting under 'Security and Authentication/Environment' to the default setting.

Interestingly, the original NameFilter was set to: [\s\*?^\$@%`"'&;|<>\[\]#\x00-\x1f]

The '\s' filter was already set to \\s, so I thought this wouldn't make any difference, but my setting was missing the tilde sign.

For reference, I installed 1.1.4 from a zip when it came out, then upgraded it using the 1.1.9 upgrade zip. I'm running Foswiki on Windows Server 2008 R2, hosted on Apache 2.2.16 with Strawberry Perl 5.12, but using IIS 7 to do the URL rewrites so that I can make it look like Bugzilla (running natively on IIS7) and Foswiki are part of the same website!

Thanks very much for your help and the quick response! I'm really pleased to get rid of this headache!

-- CharlesWilliams - 25 May 2014

I've noticed that my original NameFilter string was also missing \\[\\]#. Perhaps that was causing the problem?

I've never changed the NameFilter setting, but I have installed and upgraded a lot of extensions, so is it possible that one of the extensions overwrites this setting incorrectly?

-- CharlesWilliams - 25 May 2014