Lion & 4.6.8b1: Import of preferences fails

[FVlcek]

Hi Kirk, I have just got a new SSD and installed OS X Lion on it, a clean install to clean disk without any migration assistant. Reinstalled most software and 4.6.8.beta1 PM. Back in Snow Leo I exported all my settings from 4.6.7 (PM,Preferences,Export /select all/) to a .pmx file, then tried to import it into 4.6.8b1. Import failed with this error:

Unable to load catalog data from archive, import cancelled.

Console shows this:

20110816 1:06:38.549 AM [0x0-0x208208].com.camerabits.PhotoMechanic: Entity: line 45: parser error : PCDATA invalid Char value 16
20110816 1:06:38.549 AM [0x0-0x208208].com.camerabits.PhotoMechanic:     <item_00000000>IPTCDialogSettings/#LN#.snap</item_00000000>
20110816 1:06:38.549 AM [0x0-0x208208].com.camerabits.PhotoMechanic:                                       ^
20110816 1:06:49.044 AM [0x0-0x208208].com.camerabits.PhotoMechanic: [Tue Aug-16-2011 01:06:49.043][2964377600] scan_for_templates: ignoring empty search path(s)
20110816 1:06:52.062 AM [0x0-0x208208].com.camerabits.PhotoMechanic: [Tue Aug-16-2011 01:06:52.062][2964377600] scan_for_templates: ignoring empty search path(s)


I will send the .PMX file via private message (after all, it contains a lot of private info like ftp passwords) or email.

The error shows on Lion in both 4.6.8b1 and 4.6.7 which I reinstalled to Lion to check if it was only a quirk of the beta. Alas, no.

Thanks for the support.

      Frantisek

[Kirk Baker]

Frantisek,

Hi Kirk, I have just got a new SSD and installed OS X Lion on it, a clean install to clean disk without any migration assistant. Reinstalled most software and 4.6.8.beta1 PM. Back in Snow Leo I exported all my settings from 4.6.7 (PM,Preferences,Export /select all/) to a .pmx file, then tried to import it into 4.6.8b1. Import failed with this error:

Unable to load catalog data from archive, import cancelled.

Console shows this:

20110816 1:06:38.549 AM [0x0-0x208208].com.camerabits.PhotoMechanic: Entity: line 45: parser error : PCDATA invalid Char value 16
20110816 1:06:38.549 AM [0x0-0x208208].com.camerabits.PhotoMechanic:     <item_00000000>IPTCDialogSettings/#LN#.snap</item_00000000>
20110816 1:06:38.549 AM [0x0-0x208208].com.camerabits.PhotoMechanic:                                       ^
20110816 1:06:49.044 AM [0x0-0x208208].com.camerabits.PhotoMechanic: [Tue Aug-16-2011 01:06:49.043][2964377600] scan_for_templates: ignoring empty search path(s)
20110816 1:06:52.062 AM [0x0-0x208208].com.camerabits.PhotoMechanic: [Tue Aug-16-2011 01:06:52.062][2964377600] scan_for_templates: ignoring empty search path(s)


I will send the .PMX file via private message (after all, it contains a lot of private info like ftp passwords) or email.

The error shows on Lion in both 4.6.8b1 and 4.6.7 which I reinstalled to Lion to check if it was only a quirk of the beta. Alas, no.

It looks like one of your snapshots has non-ASCII characters in it (an IPTC Dialog Settings snapshot) and that is tripping up the file format.  If you rename that file and then do your export, the problem should be fixed.  I'll have to solve that in the 4.6.8 beta so it doesn't continue to happen.

-Kirk

[FVlcek]

Ok, that seems pretty likely.  I will try that, and confirm if the parsing error is gone. Thank you.

 Frantisek

[Kirk Baker]

Frantisek,

Ok, that seems pretty likely.  I will try that, and confirm if the parsing error is gone. Thank you.

OK, the real issue is that you have a file that looks like it is named "#LN#.snap" in your IPTCDialogSettings folder, but it has a non-printable character right before the first '#'.  So if you edit the filename and delete that hidden character or perhaps completely rename the file then the export and import should work.

I investigated the data format and non-ASCII characters are fine.  I tried it with Japanese and it works fine.  Even the '#' is OK.  Just not any non-printable characters (yours had the value 16 and just about all characters less than 32 are unusable.)  While TAB, LF, and CR are useful in formatting text, they shouldn't be used in filenames either.

-Kirk

[FVlcek]

Has a look inside the xml files in the PMX bundle, and found out the same thing :-) ASCII char #16 got there somehow, even though it doesn't show in the actual filename in finder. Sent you an email re: it. Can I just edit it out of the PMX bundle, than zip the bundle back? I can always boot back into 10.6.8 but that would be slower ;-)

Thank you, Frantisek

[Kirk Baker]

Frantisek,

Has a look inside the xml files in the PMX bundle, and found out the same thing :-) ASCII char #16 got there somehow, even though it doesn't show in the actual filename in finder. Sent you an email re: it. Can I just edit it out of the PMX bundle, than zip the bundle back? I can always boot back into 10.6.8 but that would be slower ;-)

The easiest thing would be to rename the actual file in the Finder and then re-export your settings.

You can indeed unzip the PMX bundle, delete the character from the catalog.xml file and then zip the whole thing back up again, if you're up to it.

-Kirk