Post Preview Problem - Empty Message Error SOLVED

[Nymphadora]

I have been heavily modifying a post for Bingo today. Moving things around and reformatting some things so I have been using Preview rather heavily. Only now, it won't preview for me anymore, I get an error instead telling me the message body is empty when it is clearly not empty.



I was able to preview this post before posting.

When I hit save in the post it saves the changes as I've made them.

I tried copying the contents, deleting the post entirely and posting a new reply. Once I'd copied everything into the new reply and hit preview, the same error came up but I was able to post the contents normally.

[Tolvo]

Can you post the entire code in some way? It might not work to post the code in a post naturally, but maybe a document or something, though perhaps it'd be better to wait till someone can respond that it can be sent to in case any of those are accounts you'd rather not have publicly linked. But they probably need to see the full coding to know what went wrong to give help.

I'm not totally experienced with this specific error, the best I can guess is perhaps your coding is causing it to not display anything because something can't be posted as text. So nothing is in the contents of the post but I'm not sure how specifically E's system handles that. Veks is probably the best bet if others can't figure out what is causing this or Al Terego. They tend to know the most about the sites code that I end up seeing(Though as I understand it there are more who do they just don't post much).

Is it also a preview only issue? Can it be posted? You can test perhaps if it works as a PM or editing it into a non-consequential obscure post of yours in case you don't want anyone seeing it yet. It might help get a clear idea if it's a preview only issue or a post issue. I'm not really sure why one would work but not the other but I tend to test everything in cases like this just in case there is some edge issue, or in case it will make it easier to find what the problem is and how to fix it.

[Nymphadora]

Thanks so much, Tolvo, because of your suggestions, I did some fiddling around by trying to post it elsewhere.

It will save no problem and therefore post. It will not preview.

I tried copying the entire thing to a PM to myself and it previewed.

Then I tried creating a new post in my World Building Thread but it would NOT preview again...

Then I realised there is one specific character that could be the problem....

💜

I had been looking for something fun to include. Sure enough. I took the 💜 out and just put in a regular character and I was able to Preview. But putting 💜 back in where I wanted it. NO preview possible but would save and post normally.

So That one character is the problem.

Edit: Trying to preview this post with the 💜 in it does not work. But posting it is fine... So definitely the 💜 is the problem.

[Tolvo]

I'm glad I was able to help. Someone who knows more of the technical side of the coding might know why that specific character causes a problem. I know emoji and emotes can cause various problems across different platforms due to how they display and them not existing on all the platforms that are connected to one another. I'm really only good at process of elimination and figuring out what causes the problem not what is the technical issue. ^_^

[Nymphadora]

Well, thanks again because you kinda led me to more eliminations to try!

I've got it figured out now.

[Vekseid]

MySQL by default stores unicode stuff in 3-byte unicode. Previously, I had gotten around this limitation by forcing the site into pure ASCII mode, which caused all non-ASCII characters to be encoded in html rather than unicode, so it could handle emojis, etc. fine.

Because I am planning on upgrading, though, I converted everything to four-byte unicode to prepare. Everything still works, there's just a bug in previewing that I can't be arsed to figure out as I fixed everything else.

[Nymphadora]

Don't blame you! Not a big deal since I figured out what was happening. :)

Can't wait for the upgrade! Any timeline update?   O:)

[Geraint]

I've found a peculiar twist to this issue. 

I was putting together a new page for my OOs this evening and it ended up with two emojis in it.

I like to test out complex new posts by PMing them to myself and the post with the emojis previewed perfectly well as a PM 

But the exact same post previewed as a post set off the Empty Message Error, and refused to preview though it posted correctly

Apparently posts and PMs are being previewed differently

I'm not sure that this will be of any help in finding the bug, but I thought I should mention it.