Bug Report: Illegal characters [RESOLVED]

[greynurse]

First off, let me say that I'm new to Pinballx but I am definitely staying with it as it is 1): needed to play VPX tables, and 2):the easiest front end I've tried when it comes to get up and running. Having said that, there is one issue (well, OK, probably more) that needs to be addressed, and reading through the forums, seems to be long overdue.

This is the form of users running up against illegal characters being transferred over to .xml files and being the source of  mismatches in media files. The database in Pinballx that gives table descriptions is the culprit here, as far as I can tell. Other users have posted problems with corrupted .xml files crashing the games manager. I have had this happen to me as well, and the first time I lost my Future Pinball .xml (a blessing in disguise actually). But then I noticed media files were not correct for some of the tables. I haven't filled my media directories yet by a long shot, as I will wait until I have entered all the tables first, checked the descriptions, then I will use something like PBX recorder. But just getting the wheel images to behave and not do things like change from the one i selected to another, or just simply not appear when I load Pinballx came down to double checking table descriptions for illegal characters.

Interestingly when I chose a wheel image from the on line repository, there were no illegal characters in the file names. A typical example is if you load ac ACDC table, the description in Pinballx is AC/DC. The backslash is illegal and does not appear in the online wheel repository; you get ACDC instead. The result is the image does not appear on the wheel. To fix this requires manual editing of the description name in the Games Manager.

The .xml corruption has been previously described in this forum.

While I'm at it, and I apologise if it is inappropriate to report other problems in this post, there are two more Games Manager issues I would like to mention:

* The IPDB list text file, while it contains many, many tables, has some tables missing. for example Shock from Taito do Brasil. There a quite a few others, I imagine. This is reflected in the Games Manager's table description list.

* The drop down menu for the ROMS in the Games Manager is missing. I site the ROM for the table Ali of the top of my head. There were a few more but I can't recall the off hand. And I am talking about the dedicated ROMs. I know other tables use borrowed roms, such as the Penthouse table using The Harlem Globetrotters ROM, but that's not the problem is.

At this point I should mention that I am running Pinballx on my desktop and so, my usage is a bit constricted when it comes to running multiple monitors,  I'm also running version 2.5 as I had installed 2.65 but had too many issues with VP tables terminating and staying resident, an issue about which I and others have already posted. So I went back to 2.5 and that issue has gone away for a while.

I hope this report is useful and goes towards building a better PinballX.

 

Cheers

 

 

[Carny_Priest]

One person's bug is another person's feature. If you know the rules for xml then you can have any unicode character you want properly displayed in the description field. Trademark characters, ampersands for Red & Ted's Road Show, middot character for  PIN·BOT, etc.  There is no problem identically matching table names in IPDB.txt. If a table doesn't appear just look it up on IPDB.org. Note that there are sometimes tables added to VPinMAME that don't yet have an entry at IPDB.org. They eventually catch up.  And if a table is not in IPDB.org then just add to the xml anyway. No problem. Total non-issue.

https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref

The limiting factor is that there are illegal characters forbidden for use in Windows filenames. The backslash in AC\DC is an example.

It is easy to hold "AC\DC" in the description tag, but it is illegal as a Windows filename. Consequently you would have the media file names match the value of the game name tag (your table file name) in order to display the correct media. Colon has similar issues so you can't have a file name like "Star Trek: The Next Generation" as it might appear in IPDB.txt. Instead your media would have to match the table file name in order to appear correctly in PinballX. A little more housekeeping might be required for such table titles but most would be fine without special treatment on the part of users.

All media is community contributed. There is no error checking or moderation as far as I know. So, there may have to be some renaming to fit your needs. I.e., not everyone wants to follow the format of table (manufacturer, year). The beauty is that you can tailor everything to fit your specific needs.

 

[greynurse]

Actually, I do stand corrected. Being a Windows user since the beginning, I've overlooked Microsoft's "design philosophy" in this regard. I'll try and think a little bit more outside my little sandbox before banging on about something that's only really foreign to the culture of the operating system and nothing more. My apologies.

[Draco1962]

It's easy to forget what chars are reser ed because there are so many to keep in mind.

From Microsoft:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Invalid-file-names-and-file-types-in-OneDrive-OneDrive-for-Business-and-SharePoint-64883a5d-228e-48f5-b3d2-eb39e07630fa

From MSDN:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx

[greynurse]

Urrrrrgghhhh. All too hard for a poor Aussie boy. Who came up with these rules, anyway? Never mind, it is what it is and I will try and keep it in mind from now on.