Certain characters in fixture descriptions can cause fixture to be deleted on server restart/unsanitized DB input.

[Gerhazo]

Am not sure what causes this, but the presence of certain sequences of characters in a description seems to delete fixtures on a server restart.

In general, sometimes server restarts remove certain characters from descriptions, this likely doesn't matter for most use cases, other than occasionally jumbling ASCII art and things of the sort.

To test how various sequences of characters behave in that scenario, I edited a fixture's description to test certain characters, to come back to it having disappeared.

I repeated the test, but also setting an item's description to the same thing, to verify.

My findings: an item and fixture were set to the same description below. The fixture disappeared/got deleted, but the item with the same description did not.

The item was saved in persistent storage, a quarters chest.

Am curious why this occurs and whether it's something that can be resolved or an odd technical limitation.

[Aeryeris]

Sounds similar to this:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=43003&p=325116#p325116

Tldr to cover the now missing screenshots:

• Certain characters in the description cause the fixture to fail saving to the database.
• The fixture limit won't be increased when placing down the fixture.

[Gerhazo]

Sounds similar to this:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=43003&p=325116#p325116

Tldr to cover the now missing screenshots:

• Certain characters in the description cause the fixture to fail saving to the database.
• The fixture limit won't be increased when placing down the fixture.

That seems related to this. I also didn't notice/realise the fixture limit thing, that's helpful.

[Gerhazo]

Further testing:
As was mentioned, -area can be used to determine whether the fixture was truly saved.

\ doesn't save properly
\\ does
\\\ doesn't
\\\\ does, again

It seems highly likely that the input sent to the database isn't sanitized and these are being treated as special characters.

[MissEvelyn]

Isn't \ an "escape" character in code speak?

[Darkstorn42]

This is something I ran into trying to create ascii art IG. The '\' is an escape, as MissEvelyn points out. That means, it tells the regular expression (regex) to ignore the next special character typed and treat it as a string. So that means it goes away. So therefore in \\, the first slash is an escape that treats the next slash as a slash and not as an escape.

Play around with this on discord to help understand. Something like bold \*text* and italic \**text**.