[Forum] CKEditor choking on some special characters

[Thunderbird]

On my forum, we've run into some issues with some special characters causing problems when they appear in posts (such as é). If someone (either the original poster or a moderator) tries to edit a post containing such a character, the editor box will be blank instead of containing the post. This also occurs when previewing a post containing said character.

Disabling the plugin/hook system via the ACP doesn't resolve the issue. This has happened both on the main board (running 4.1.12 PL1) and the test board (running 4.2.0). However, I could not reproduce the issue here.

Any thoughts?

(EDIT)I reuploaded the 4.1.12 PL1 /clientscript folder to the main board as a test (though no files in said folder have ever been modified) and got the same problem. The Suspect File Versions check doesn't report any issues with vB files. However, the server is running PHP 5.4 (I would hope this isn't the problem, as I can't put it back to 5.3).

(EDIT)Looking at the CKEditor site, it appears that a change in the default encoding of htmlspecialchars() (from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8) causes the editor to throw a blank box in some instances. Peachy.

I fixed it on my board by the following change to /vb/ckeditor.php

Line 507:
htmlspecialchars($value)

Changed to

htmlspecialchars($value, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, "ISO-8859-1")

[Zachery]

That sounds like mod_security blocking the special characters via ajax. What is your database encoding?

[Thunderbird]

Collation shows as latin1_swedish_ci, if that's what you're looking for.

The mention about mod_security made me take a look at the Problematic Server Modules diagnostic in ACP, which didn't show any issues.

I have a copy of Apache 2.4/PHP 5.4 installed on my own computer (completely locked out from the outside world), though I've kept vB off of it ever since bringing the test board mentioned in my above post back online. I'd throw an installation on said server to double-check the issue, though the license agreement makes me balk at doing so.

I've noticed that nobody on my board reported these issues with the editor until around a week after the server had been upgraded to PHP 5.4.

[Zachery]

vBulletin with php 5. 4 isn't ready for prime time. we'd suggest downgrading.

[Thunderbird]

Unfortunately I don't really have control over the version of PHP on the server, so I can't really do that. The file edit I mentioned in my first post did make the issue go away though (I also found a bug report on the CKEditor site tracker that was pretty much this same problem...after posting this thread).

[BibleWheel]

On my forum, we've run into some issues with some special characters causing problems when they appear in posts (such as é). If someone (either the original poster or a moderator) tries to edit a post containing such a character, the editor box will be blank instead of containing the post. This also occurs when previewing a post containing said character.

Disabling the plugin/hook system via the ACP doesn't resolve the issue. This has happened both on the main board (running 4.1.12 PL1) and the test board (running 4.2.0). However, I could not reproduce the issue here.

Any thoughts?

(EDIT)I reuploaded the 4.1.12 PL1 /clientscript folder to the main board as a test (though no files in said folder have ever been modified) and got the same problem. The Suspect File Versions check doesn't report any issues with vB files. However, the server is running PHP 5.4 (I would hope this isn't the problem, as I can't put it back to 5.3).

(EDIT)Looking at the CKEditor site, it appears that a change in the default encoding of htmlspecialchars() (from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8) causes the editor to throw a blank box in some instances. Peachy.

I fixed it on my board by the following change to /vb/ckeditor.php

Line 507:
htmlspecialchars($value)

Changed to

htmlspecialchars($value, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, "ISO-8859-1")

Magnificent! Thank you!

I've had the same problem for the last month since my host upgraded to PHP 5.4.2. I just made the change you suggested and it fixed it.

[xheliox]

Ha. Yes, thank you! This was driving me nuts!

And I'm really disappointed to hear vBulletin isn't ready for PHP 5.4.

[Quijar Haderak]

Thank you Thunderbird, with this fix and the fix for GD images, at the moment vbulletin 4.2 work fine in php 5.4.x

[Miss T]

thansk so mych for this fix

do you have a solution for the smiley-box as well ? it gets to big 150*1500 because i have custom smilies...

so unless i want to revert to default smilies the cke editor needs a fix... any ideas ?

[rughis]

Hi Thunderbird, I tried to apply your patch on my 4.2.1 board, but it didn't solve the problem

[Spink]

I'm having this same problem and the fix that Thunderbird suggested isn't working for me. Any other suggestions?

A user on our boards specifically said "IF you use characters like &^&^%$$#@@% " and I can't edit this post...