A red upside down question mark ate my data.

[Richard Gilligan]

> 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 happen to find this recent comment by John Ralls in an unrelated thread:

>>After a couple of bug reports about files being corrupted by invalid UTF8 and ASCII control characters, the latter of which are 
>>illegal in XML, 2.6 introduced checking every string for invalid characters. That slows down loads, imports, and saves even more.

So now I think I can answer my own questions.

I probably introduced the bad character by copying a file name from the Mavericks GUI into a gnucash transaction description.

Others have seen the problem, and it is solved for 2.6

So I have upgrade to 2.6.1

Cheers,

Richard