Junk Characters

[Sam]

Dear Developer, We have reported this issue earlier too, but saw that no proper reply was given and the ticked was 'closed'. We are using ckeditor on a CMS. The content could contain many html tags. After saving a content and then on editing the same again, we see that suddenly all the html tags are converted to < &gt etc. There are also cases where it inserts some &amp words, destroying the whole content. We have had a tough time correcting the content and sometimes going through charector by character to remove the junk.

The issue is noticed more on Windows XP.

See below text that ckeditor converted and "destroyed". Please..Please give me a solution. URGENT!! we are losing valuable business and the client's trust.

See content....

<p> <p> Infectious mononucleosis (IM), commonly known as <em>kissing disease,</em> is a viral syndrome resulting

[Jakub Ś]

1. Which ticket was it?
2. As I understand you use CKEditor 3.6.4. Is it plain CKEditor JavaScript or perhaps CKEditor ASP.NET?
3. Editor has nothing to do with data saving. You should rather debug whole request to check where it gets converted. This is rather something on server-side.

[Sam]

Replying to j.swiderski:

1. Which ticket was it?
2. As I understand you use CKEditor 3.6.4. Is it plain CKEditor JavaScript or perhaps CKEditor ASP.NET?
3. Editor has nothing to do with data saving. You should rather debug whole request to check where it gets converted. This is rather something on server-side.

Let me answer 2 and 3

2. we use CKeditor ASP.NET
3. Our CMS holds multiple instances of CKEditor and we can visually "see" that the & &gt stuff is inserted suddenly on all the CKEditor field contents. we do not have to save the item. Its happening on the screen! (if we notice it, we immediately cancel the edit and the data is safe. else its deep trouble for us)

[Sam]

Replying to j.swiderski:

1. Which ticket was it?
2. As I understand you use CKEditor 3.6.4. Is it plain CKEditor JavaScript or perhaps CKEditor ASP.NET?
3. Editor has nothing to do with data saving. You should rather debug whole request to check where it gets converted. This is rather something on server-side.

Dear Swiderski,

Let me add that this does NOT happen always. its only once in a while that we see it. So not sure what triggers the tag replacing.

Please see how the data looked moments before the change. Attachment: "actual_data.jpg"

[Jakub Ś]

1. Perhaps there is some script that is causing this? Editor doesn't convert tags to entities just like that.
2. Do you use update panel - perhaps after all this is happening when you save and reload data into editor?

Side note: you can update client-side code for CKEditor to even CKE 4.1.1. If you are interested how to do it please let me know.

[Sam]

Replying to j.swiderski:

1. Perhaps there is some script that is causing this? Editor doesn't convert tags to entities just like that.
2. Do you use update panel - perhaps after all this is happening when you save and reload data into editor?

Side note: you can update client-side code for CKEditor to even CKE 4.1.1. If you are interested how to do it please let me know.

Yes, Swiderski,

We are using Update Panel. There are certain actions that would need a new data to be brought in and displayed. Can this cause a problem? if yes, please let us know how this could be solved.

However, we are a little wary to do a version change as it would require a lot of correspondence with the client, get their approval, explain why this is being done etc. We'll go into that at a later stage.

thank you!

[Jakub Ś]

I had this issue once. User was using plain JavaScript CKEditor plus config.htmlEncodeOutput configuration option.
Solution was either stop using this option (I'm not sure if dropping it causes any problems) or changing plain CKEditor JavaScript to CKEditor ASP.NET (which contains CKEditor JavaScript).

Is this the issue you are having?

NOTE: if it is your issue and you plan to move to CKEditor for ASP.NET then please note that you can or even should update client-side version to 3.6.6.1 or 4.1.2.

[Sam]

Replying to j.swiderski:

I had this issue once. User was using plain JavaScript CKEditor plus config.htmlEncodeOutput configuration option.
Solution was either stop using this option (I'm not sure if dropping it causes any problems) or changing plain CKEditor JavaScript to CKEditor ASP.NET (which contains CKEditor JavaScript).

Is this the issue you are having?

NOTE: if it is your issue and you plan to move to CKEditor for ASP.NET then please note that you can or even should update client-side version to 3.6.6.1 or 4.1.2.

Thanks Swiderski, We are using CKEditor for ASP.NET. But we identified that we are using Update Panel. There are certain actions that would need a new data to be brought in and displayed.

1. Can this cause a problem? if yes, please let us know how this could be solved.
2. Is there a method by which we can bring back the text by removing the &amp stuff?

-Sam

[Jakub Ś]

In case I had standard instead of ASP.NET editor was used. In order to avoid security issues user was having this option set config.htmlEncodeOutput = true;. This was causing encoded HTML being send to server (so far ok)

On server user was doing something like this: TheText = Server.HtmlDecode(txtRichText.Text);. The Problem is that he was calling ASP.NET control which represented textarea on client-side and which was replaced by editor. In short he was calling textarea and editor still received encoded HTML on post back.

If you are getting same result then you have similar problem despite using CKEditor ASP.NET. Please check this.
I think this issue is invalid and has nothing to do with editor but I will keep it open for a while and wait for update.