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| Author | Topic: weird characters in cms | 9486 views |

18 May 2008 at 1:28am
hello,
after installing silverstripe on a client's server, weird characters are showing up in the cms.
unfortunately uploading attachments in this forum seems to be buggy - i can't.
the characters appear just before any html-code (even before doctype declaration), they change every time i log in, always 4 characters like 'ad28'.
the frontend site itself is clean.
has anybody an idea where this may come from or maybe a starting point where to search for a possible problem?
thanks in advance
Last edited: 18 May 2008 at 1:56am

21 May 2008 at 5:42am
after several hours on irc (many thanks to all folks there) on many more hours alone on my own, i finally found a fix for this (ss version 2.2.1).
in fact i don't know what exactly causes this error, maybe a bug in php version 5.2.5?
to fix it do the following:
file: sapphire/core/Requirements.php
line: 183
todo: before ‘return’ statement, add a line with ‘echo ” “‘
– and –
file: cms/code/LeftAndMain.php
line: 205
todo: before ‘return’ statement, add a line with ‘echo ” “‘
this is just a workaround, any further description/fix for this problem is appreciated.

21 May 2008 at 10:33am
Thanks for the bug report, I've added to the bug tracker @

28 May 2008 at 10:27pm
finally, the characters even arrived in the frontend site itself.
this allows me specify the problem a little better:
the characters seem to appear whenever a string is returned by some method and integrated in the html output. in addition, the string must have reached a critical length (i can't determine the exact limit).
whenever you 'echo' some string before the return statement, the characters are gone.
i was wondering wheter this has to do something with output buffering.

7 June 2008 at 4:42pm
This is some odd behaviour indeed, something that I've noticed before on another SS installation as a similar problem (a strange character left above the <?php tag on a class), but haven't personally come across it myself.
Have you tried removing all your custom project code, to leave a bare SS installation? This could help pinpoint exactly where the problem is occurring.
Typically this is a good way of debugging if you've got a problem like this, as it's not actually giving any errors! (d'oh!).

9 June 2008 at 10:11pm
i removed all of my code and even did a fresh install - didn't solve the problem.
i expected this, as my workaround (see previous posts) deals with untouched core files, although project code may suffer from the same problem in case a method returns something integrated in the final html output (as mentioned before)...

13 June 2008 at 10:24am
This looks suspiciously like the chunk-size characters that HTTP chunked transfers add to the stream.
For this reason, I suspect that this is happening because of a quirk in your web server configuration. Could you tell us a bit more about the web server that you're running on?
* Apache, or something else? What version? Any non-standard modules running?
* What version of PHP?
* What operating system?
If you could email me some details (to sam at silverstripe dot com) of where your server is running so that I could access the site myself, I could take a look at the raw HTTP output to see if I can determine what's wrong.

13 June 2008 at 11:35am
Heh, that last post was from me - I was logged in as Mike! Sorry about the identity theft, Mike. ;-)
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