New Pram's Wish List

[Surreal]

Curses! I can't remember what my member ID and password are.

There isn't an option to retrieve this information either.

[Taiga]

Curses! I can't remember what my member ID and password are.

There isn't an option to retrieve this information either.

Isn't it the same one you're using right now?

[Surreal]

Well it says that its separate from the forums member server.

It also doesn't help that when I try to register an account there I get told that my email address is already registered there. Finally, the only emails I find in my gmail account about NISA are the Prinny Bomb newsletters so I haven't got a message or anything confirming my account details from the looks of things.

[odinfan]

You don't happen to use other passwords(that you might not remember off the top of your head), do you? Because I use a few different variations on one password, and I couldn't log in until I went through them, one at a time.

[Surreal]

Is the password alphanumerical by any chance?

[odinfan]

I believe so.

[Surreal]

I give up.

I didn't know if I was going to use it much but the fact that I can't retrieve my log in details has pretty much made the decision for me.

[robbie]

@Surreal
E-mail support@nisamerica.com and we'll look them up for you. There's a forgotten password link on the member's login page.

Edit: I found your account and I'm resetting your password, check your e-mail shortly.

[Surreal]

Cheers and sorry for being a nuisance. XD

[robbie]

Do any of you guys patrol the Wish List often? I've been super busy at the office and have had less time to go and moderate things. I'd like to find someone who can browse the List at least once a day and close junk wishes until I get the wish reporting stuff ironed out. If you're interested, send me a PM!

[Prinny]

One thing I did notice with the wish list is when a comment uses an apostrophe it shows up as "don\\\'t" with 3 \s in there for some reason... shows up on almost everyone I see.

[Solice]

One thing I did notice with the wish list is when a comment uses an apostrophe it shows up as "don\\\'t" with 3 \s in there for some reason... shows up on almost everyone I see.

If I had to wager a guess, it could be a result of multiple nested calls to trap special characters or character sequences. In this case, the original string could be

I don't want to give up my cheese.

In order to make sure that single quote, which may have special meaning in a particular programming language such as SQL, C, or Pascal, you write a function to replace the occurrence with a \', changing it into an escape sequence so you the system will interpret it as the character itself and not activate its special meaning. In this case, the function may be called multiple times as the string may be passed multiple times so the string can become ever longer in the sequence of slashes depending on how many times the function is called. Additionally, the \ character could be special, so changing it to a \\ will break on itself.

If this is a proprietary function, then I recommend rewriting it to detect if the previous character was already a backslash and breaking out of the function if it is. That should probably clear it up unless you're doing it to prevent screwage from passing it through multiple programming languages.

[robbie]

It's some kind of server setting that's automatically escaping SQL characters. Pram's Wish List runs flawlessly on my local server, but runs into issues on the server in Japan. Haven't been able to find any similar problems online, though. Some functions, such as strip_tags() automatically escape characters on the server, but not my local server so I think there's a naughty function somewhere that's mucking things up. When things cool down around here, I'll spend more time hunting it down.

[VenerableSage]

(Newbie ahoy, but I have knowledge of SQL and PHP.)

@Prinny, Solice, (robbie) - The reason for the additional backslashes is that the text is being reentered (or something akin to that) into the SQL field that it sits in. While in that text field, it keeps each apostrophe as \' (as was said), and when it's reentered, it needs to add the \\ in order to convert \' into something that its field can handle. So, as Solice said, it'll escape the backslash, making it a pair, and then escape the apostrophe, making it \'. Thus, you get an increased number of backslashes every time the text is reentered into the database.

-------------

Possible solution:
While I'm not personally seeing the escaped apostrophes on my end, if you put in calls to the PHP function stripslashes() in the sections where the (problematic) text will be displayed on the pages, it'll remove all instances of the backslashes from the text when it's displayed. Granted, this won't "solve" the problem of the backslashes being added when the comment is entered into the SQL database (to which, I'm unaware of a solution, as that's SQL's way of maintaining that character in the text block), but at least they won't appear when the text on the page is output.

(Also, as I came across it when I was working with a similar situation, sometimes the stripslashes() function won't remove all of the backslashes and will only catch some of them. In that case, you may need to write a recursive function that calls stripslashes() until there aren't any backslashes left.)

(As for that specific inconsistency, it's likely a PHP version difference, I would suspect. Either that, or just a matter of different configurations or something between the two servers. I experienced a similar issue of the summer with an application that I was working on. We ended up having to manually debug the software and fix things as we found them. :/)

Hopefully that's helpful in some way. (And, hopefully, I didn't make myself look stupid for either not answering anything of use or for posting a solution if it was fixed between yesterday and today. >_>)

[robbie]

I'm already using strip slashes when displaying the data because the SQL characters need to be escaped for security purposes. The problem is some other function is (unexpectedly) escaping the characters again. This becomes a problem because it escapes the slashes from escaping the other characters, like this:
"Hey, what's up" => "Hey, what\'s up" => "Hey, what\\\'s up" => "Hey, what\\\\\\\'s up" and so on...
This issue seems to become really annoying when a user is asked to login, then to fix an error, etc. as the slashes get escaped over and over while being passed around between pages.

I've tried removing all of the escape functions and the problem still persists. I can't just set up a strip slashes loop either, because that will eventually corrupt properly escaped data. When I have more free time, I'm going to track down the trouble-making function or php.ini setting, but until then we'll have to live with the bug.

I'd rather not get into the issue too much deeper on the public forums here, but feel free to PM if you'd like to talk about it.