Currently on around 10% of all prints that we do using PDF's converted to Postscript we get the following error:-
ERROR: rangecheck
OFFENDING COMMAND: xyshow COMMANDTYPE: operatortype
From reading up this indicates that there is something within the file which is going outside of a numarray or numstring. Looking at the actual prints there is nothing that appears over large, apart from a single body of text but that is printed on every single page - 90% of the prints come out OK so I assume that can't be the cause.
The only two fields which change in size between files are an article description and a customer name. The article description seems to range upwards of 30 characters, i have had a failure at 31 characters and a success at 32. Customer names are always less characters than this.
If it makes any difference there are multiple barcodes also being printed as part of these documents - all barcodes values while different are the same number of characters.
Any help much appreciated!
From the PostScript Language Reference Manual:
xyshow string numarray xyshow –
string numstring xyshow –
...
...
If numarray or numstring is exhausted before all the characters of string have been shown, a rangecheck error occurs.
This is most likely the source of the problem. However, since you haven't supplied an example file, its impossible to tell for sure.
This would suggest a fault in the conversion from PDF to PostScript, and you haven't said how you are doing that, either, which makes it impossible to offer any advice.
Related
I am facing a weird problem.
I have extracted data from an Excel file. It should contain an IBAN account number.
Then I tried to analyze the set of account numbers (which the source guarantees to be good) with a Java library.
To keep the scope of the question narrow, I can't explain the following. The below strings are different
03069
03069
The first is a copy & paste from the Excel file, the second is handwritten. Google returns different results for abi [above number] and in fact in the second case I can find that it is the bank code for Intesa Sanpaolo bank (exact page displaying the ABI code, localized, here).
So, to keep the scope narrow: how is that possible? Is it something to do with the encoding?
Try it yourself: do CTRL+F and try type "030", it will select both lines. Now type 6, it will match only the 2nd line.
Same happened in Notepad++
There's an U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE in between 030 and 69 in the first text.
Paste the text in https://www.branah.com/unicode-converter for example, or edit in a hexadecimal capable editor.
The solution for cleaning such strings could be for example to whitelist characters, so replace everything that isn't A-Z0-9 will be scrubbed.
I have a string that, by using string.format("%02X", char), I've received the following:
74657874000000EDD37001000300
In the end, I'd like that string to look like the following:
t e x t NUL NUL NUL í Ó p SOH NUL ETX NUL (spaces are there just for clarification of characters desired in example).
I've tried to use \x..(hex#), string.char(0x..(hex#)) (where (hex#) is alphanumeric representation of my desired character) and I am still having issues with getting the result I'm looking for. After reading another thread about this topic: what is the way to represent a unichar in lua and the links provided in the answers, I am not fully understanding what I need to do in my final code that is acceptable for this to work.
I'm looking for some help in better understanding an approach that would help me to achieve my desired result provided below.
ETA:
Well I thought that I had fixed it with the following code:
function hexToAscii(input)
local convString = ""
for char in input:gmatch("(..)") do
convString = convString..(string.char("0x"..char))
end
return convString
end
It appeared to work, but didnt think about characters above 127. Rookie mistake. Now I'm unsure how I can get the additional characters up to 256 display their ASCII values.
I did the following to check since I couldn't truly "see" them in the file.
function asciiSub(input)
input = input:gsub(string.char(0x00), "<NUL>") -- suggested by a coworker
print(input)
end
I did a few gsub strings to substitute in other characters and my file comes back with the replacement strings. But when I ran into characters in the extended ASCII table, it got all forgotten.
Can anyone assist me in understanding a fix or new approach to this problem? As I've stated before, I read other topics on this and am still confused as to the best approach towards this issue.
The simple way to transform a base16-encoded string is just to
function unhex( input )
return (input:gsub( "..", function(c)
return string.char( tonumber( c, 16 ) )
end))
end
This is basically what you have, just a bit cleaner. (There's no need to say "(..)", ".." is enough – if you specify no captures, you'll automatically get the whole match. And while it might work if you write string.char( "0x"..c ), it's just evil – you concatenate lots of strings and then trigger the automatic conversion to numbers. Much better to just specify the base when explicitly converting.)
The resulting string should be exactly what went into the hex-dumper, no matter the encoding.
If you cannot correctly display the result, your viewer will also be unable to display the original input. If you used different viewers for the original input and the resulting output (e.g. a text editor and a terminal), try writing the output to a file instead and looking at it with the same viewer you used for the original input, then the two should be exactly the same.
Getting viewers that assume different encodings (e.g. one of the "old" 8-bit code pages or one of the many versions of Unicode) to display the same thing will require conversion between different formats, which tends to be quite complicated or even impossible. As you did not mention what encodings are involved (nor any other information like OS or programs used that might hint at the likely encodings), this could be just about anything, so it's impossible to say anything more specific on that.
You actually have a couple of problems:
First, make sure you know the meaning of the term character encoding, and that you know the difference between characters and bytes. A popular post on the topic is The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
Then, what encoding was used for the bytes you just received? You need to know this, otherwise you don't know what byte 234 means. For example it could be ISO-8859-1, in which case it is U+00EA, the character ê.
The characters 0 to 31 are control characters (eg. 0 is NUL). Use a lookup table for these.
Then, displaying the characters on the terminal is the hard part. There is no platform-independent way to display ê on the terminal. It may well be impossible with the standard print function. If you can't figure this step out you can search for a question dealing specifically with how to print Unicode text from Lua.
As already pointed out in the topic, I got the following error:
Character #\u009C cannot be represented in the character set CHARSET:CP1252
trying to print out a string given back by drakma:http-request, as far as I understand the error-code the problem is that the windows-encoding (CP1252) does not support this character.
Therefore to be able to process it, I might/must convert the whole string.
My question is what package/library does support converting strings to certain character-sets efficiently?
An alike question is this one, but just ignoring the error would not help in my case.
Drakma already does the job of "converting strings": after all, when it reads from some random webserver, it just gets a stream of bytes. It then has to convert that to a lisp string. You probably want to bind *drakma-default-external-format* to something else, although I can't remember off-hand what the allowable values are. Maybe something like :utf-8?
I'm using FitNesse to test web service responses using check to compare the expected to the actual response.
In some cases the check is failing and I can't see what the differences are between the expected and the actual that is causing it to fail.
Here's a screenshot from what it's telling me in a specific instance (of many similar instances):
Feel free to point out the obvious; it's probably staring at me in the face and I'm looking so hard I can't see it!
I would check that the expected and actual strings are both written with the same text encoding. I've seen this error plenty of times when the text comparing failed due to a comma or apostrophe being written in different encodes.
It is possible that your string contains extra spaces in the actual value. FitNesse, being html based, will not respect leading or trailing spaces. It might not handle any extra spaces inside the actual either. So this can cause the result to be different, but not visibly so.
See if you can add some debug messages that would help you see the extra spaces, or at least count the number of characters in both strings.
This question doesn't specify whether Slim or Fit are being used, or which Slim server/plugin if using Slim, but I found the following to be true for me using FitNesse release 20130530 and fitSharp release 2.2:
Non-ASCII characters and { apostrophes / single quote characters } in input arguments/parameters that are strings are HTML encoded. The values in my FitNesse test tables are HTML encoded, but only the required syntax characters and (double) quotes; not the non-ASCII characters (and FitNesse doesn't seem to have any problems storing those values).
EOL characters in the input arguments that are strings consist of a linefeed character only
I imagine that because I'm using .NET, EOLs in my return values consist of carriage return and linefeed characters.
Because of [1], I'm HTML-encoding non-ASCII characters (but not the HTML syntax characters or quotes). Because of [2] and [3], I'm now removing carriage return characters from my fixture return values. Both changes seem to have resolved this issue for me and expected and actual values are now reported as being the same.
Whitespace has troubled me often. The resulting HTML just collapses whitespace, but the compare in code does not.
I now use a fixture to make differences more explicit to me. Example usage: http://fhoeben.github.io/hsac-fitnesse-fixtures/examples-results/HsacExamples.SlimTests.UtilityFixtures.CompareFixtureTest.html
Newer versions of FitNesse (since 20151230) do a diff on the expected and actual result values. Has that helped you at all?
I was getting advice from Rob Kennedy and one of his suggestions that greatly increased the speed of an app I was working on was to use SetString and then load it into the VCL component that displayed it.
I'm using Delphi 2009 so now that PChar is Unicode,
SetString(OutputString, PChar(Output), OutputLength.Value);
edtString.Text := edtString.Text + OutputString;
Works and I changed it to PChar myself but since the data being moved isn't always Unicode in fact its usually ShortString Data.... so onto what he actually gave me to use:
SetString(OutputString, PAnsiChar(Output), OutputLength.Value);
edtString.Text := edtString.Text + OutputString;
Nothing shows up but I check in the debugger and the text that normally appeared the way I did it building 1 char at a time in the past was in the variable.
Oddly enough this is not the first time I ran into this tonight. Because I was trying to come up with another way, I took part of his advice and instead of building into a VCL's TCaption I built it into a string variable and then copied it, but when I send it over nothing's displayed. Once again in the debugger the variable that the data is built in... has the data.
for I := 0 to OutputLength.Value - 1 do
begin
OutputString := OutputString + Char(OutputData^[I]);
end;
edtString.Text := OutputString;
The above does not work but the old slow way of doing it worked just fine....
for I := 0 to OutputLength.Value - 1 do
begin
edtString.Text := edtString.Text + Char(OutputData^[I]);
end;
I tried making the variable a ShortString, String and TCaption and nothing is displayed. What I also find interesting is while I build my hex data from the same array into a richedit it's very fast while doing it inside an edit for the text data is very very slow. Which is why I haven't bothered trying to change the code for the richedit as it works superfast as it is.
Edit to add - I think I sorta found the problem but I have no solution. If I edit the value in the debugger to remove anything that can't be displayed (which by the old method used to just not display... not fail) then what I have left is displayed. So if it's just a matter of getting rid of bytes that were turned to characters that are garbage how can I fix that?
I basically have incoming raw data from a SCSI device that's being displayed hex-editor style. My original slow style of adding one char at a time successfully displayed strings and Unicode strings that did not have Unicode-specific characters in them. The faster methods even if working won't display ShortStrings one way and the other way wont display UnicodeStrings that aren't using non 0-255 characters. I really like and could use the speed boost but if it means sacrificing the ability to read the string... then what's the point in the app?
EDIT3 - Alright now that I've figured out that 0-31 is control char and 32 and up is valid I think I'm gonna make an attempt to filter char and replace those not valid with a . which is something I was planning on doing later to emulate hex editor style.
If there are any other suggestions I'd be glad to hear about them but otherwise I think I can craft a solution that's faster than the original and does what I need it to at the same time.
Some comments:
Your question is very unclear. What exactly do you want to do?
Your question reads terrible, please check your text with a spelling checker.
The question you are referring to is this one: Delphi accessing data from dynamic array that is populated from an untyped pointer
Please give a complete code sample of your function like you did in your previous question, I want to know if you implemented Rob Kennedy's suggestion or the code you gave yourself in a following answer (let's hope not :) )
As far a I understand your question: You're sending a query to your SCSI device and you get an array of bytes back which you store in the variable OutputData. After that you want to show your data to the user. So your real question is: How to show an array of bytes to the user?
Login as the same user and don't create an account for every new question. That way we can track your question history an can find out what you mean by 'getting advice'.
Some assumptions and suggestions if I'm right about the true meaning of your question:
Showing your data as a hex string won't give any problems
Showing your data in a normal Memo field gives you problems, although a Delphi string can contain any character, including 0 bytes, displaying them will give you problems. A TMemo for example will show your data till the first 0 byte. What you have to do (and you gave the answer yourself), is replacing non viewable characters with a dummy. After that you can show your data in a TMemo. Actually all hex viewers do the same, characters that cannot be printed will be shown as a dot.
I used PAnsiChar in my example for a reason. It looked like OutputLength was being measured in bytes, not characters, so I made sure to use a type whose length is always measured in bytes. You'll also notice that I showed the declaration of OutputString as an AnsiString.
Since the edit control stored Unicode, though, there will be a conversion between AnsiString and UnicodeString. That will take the system's current code page into account, but that's probably not what you want. You might want to declare the variable as a RawByteString instead. That won't have any code page associated with it, so there won't be any unexpected conversions.
Don't use strings for storing binary data. If you're building what amounts to a hex editor, then you're working with binary data. It's important to remember that. Even if your binary data happens to consist mostly of bytes that can be interpreted as text, you can't treat the data as text or you'll run into exactly the problems you're seeing — characters that don't appear as expected. If you get a bunch of bytes from your SCSI device, then store them in an array of bytes, not characters.
In hex editors, you'll notice that they always show the hexadecimal values of the bytes. They might show those bytes interpreted as characters, but that's secondary, and they generally only show the bytes that can represent ASCII characters; they don't try to get too fancy with the basic display. The good hex editors will offer to display the data interpreted as wide characters, too. This aids in debugging because the user can look at the same data in multiple ways. But they're just views of the data. They're not actually changing the binary contents of the data.
When you filter out non viewable characters...You'll probably need to decide what to do with a couple of them like #9(Tab), #10(LF), #11(Verticle Tab), #12(FF-or New Page),#13(CR)