A red upside down question mark ate my data.

Richard Gilligan richard-lists at parkcitiesmac.com
Fri Feb 28 01:15:32 EST 2014


Hi Gnucash List,

I have a gnucash book that I have been keeping since about 2002 through many gnucash versions on several apple computers running every version of OS X since 10.1

I am using Gnucash 2.4.11

Last week I discovered many transactions, and some  accounts had disappeared, leaving the balances wrong.

I did a lot of investigation among the dozens of .gnucash files and I have discovered these files (starting with the oldest):
>my "last good" .gnucash file
>A log file that introduces a corrupting "space" at the end of one transaction description.
>A  sequence of .gnucash files that all contain the missing data but do not display it and show wrong balances when opened with Gnucash.
	These files were created during several days when I did not quit Gnucash. During that time the displayed balances were correct and Gnucash acted normally. Then believe I quit and restarted Gnucash. After working a few hours I realized that some transactions seemed to be missing. This created: 
>A sequence of .gnucash files that _do not_ contain the missing data and of course show wrong balances when opened in Gnucash.

Eventually I discovered that all the .gnucash files that _do_ contain the missing data could be fix by editing the xml to remove a single "space" from  the end of one particular transaction description. I assume it is not really a "space" character. Adding a "space" back in does not corrupt the files gain. And when I did a terminal diff on the last good and first bad files, that line was caught as modified but no space was displayed for either version.  TextWrangler displays it as a red upside down question mark. And as "/x10" in the search window.

If I open my "lastgood" .gnucash file and replay the log file with the corrupting character it breaks my book in exactly the same way every time.

So my questions:

How did this bad character get introduced into my gnucash file?

Has this happened to others?

Would switching to the SQL backend avoid a reoccurrence?

I am pretty much back together and moving on but I would appreciate any comments that people might care to offer.

Cheers,

Richard









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