Question

I've just installed TWiki on a hosted domain and things seems to be working pretty well. However, something seems to repeatedly currupt the DATE variable in my TWiki.cfg file. What happens is that I will try to same a topic after editing it and get the following error message:

"Topic save error /usr/bin/ci -l -q -mnone -t-none -d'ÚTE%' -w'guest' /home/skyloom/twiki/data/Test/TestTopic2.txt 2>&1 1>/dev/null ci: unknown date/time: ÚTE% ci aborted"

Looking at that, I saw the date variable looked odd and so I went and checked the TWiki.cfg file and sure enough it read "ÚTE%". So I went in and corrected it and then things seemed to work OK for a while. But then it happens again - so I went back and corrected it again. Ater 2 or 3 times, I figured that some action was changing this file. Any suggestions as to what is causing this?

• TWiki version: Dec 2001
• Web server: Apache
• Server OS: Linux
• Web browser: IE
• Client OS: Mac OS X

-- LynnwoodBrown - 16 Mar 2002

Answer

Well, I think I figured out the problem. I was using the file management function built into the hosting service control panel to edit the TWiki.cfg file and apparently it was reinterpreting the text string "%DA" as "Ú" each time it saved the file. So I went back to my original copy of the TWiki.cfg file, updated any changes I had made since installing it, and then reinstalled it with my ftp program. It seems to work OK now. It makes me wonder what other variables it may have messed with.

I'll leave this topic up for a few days to see if anyone else has any useful comments and then I'll close it out.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 16 Mar 2002

The control panel is probably interpreting %DA as a two-digit hexadecimal string - so the only variables that will be affected are any others that start with the letters A-D, with second letter A-D (or a digit). %DATE% is the only one that fits this pattern (confirmed by a quick vi search of TWiki.cfg), so you shouldn't have any more problems.

Would be worth reporting the control panel bug to your ISP, though.

-- RichardDonkin - 17 Mar 2002

Thanks Richard for the feedback. I will report that to my ISP as I was finding it very useful to do all my editing of config files inside of my browser rather than having to go through the cycle of editing in text editor, saving & re-uploading via ftp.

I think this kind of does it for this topic so I'm hereby classifying it as "anwsered."

-- LynnwoodBrown - 17 Mar 2002