Re: This time a real clip bug: it crashes...

[Bob Zimmerman zimmerman@xxxxxxxx]

Howdy all,

I continue to play with CLIP.EXE, trying to find out why it sometimes crashes.

Robert Holmgren wrote:
>My guess is, Win98 is choking on Unicode. The only illegal Clipboard char is
>Ascii-0 -- it brings the whole Clipboard to a dead stop.

The issue, as you so aptly put it, is figuring out where such an illegal character is coming from,
assuming that is the cause of the problem. Today I tried to clip the attached text with CLIP, and it
crashed. I subsequently started experimenting by selecting text word by word, from the beginning of
the file. Up until the last full sentence, CLIP would work fine, clipping the selected text into the
clipboard with no problem.

When I included the word "helping", however, CLIP crashed. When I parsed this word, I
found that I could clip everything in the text up to and including the letter "h" of
"helping." When I included the "e" however, clip would crash. I was able to do
this consistently.

Note that this experimentation was done with a Xy4 file, saved in Xy4. The last sentence was written
by me in Xywrite. It was not pasted into Xywrite by another Windows program. If my macro program QM
put something strange into the file the initial time it pasted material into Xy4, how could that end
up at this particular spot in the text, after I have written new stuff there? Moreover, when I load
this file in a window text editor, I don't see anything strange at this point in the file. If it has
an illegal character in it, is there some way to spot it?

Anyway, I've attached the suspect text. Can anyone else duplicate the crash?

By the way, I do run Xy4 in a desktop window.

BobIn your last email you wrote:
>I will arrive in Baltimore at 6 PM on Apr 18 and will be free
>that evening...

If you want, I could pick you up at the airport, treat you to dinner at our home in Beltsville, all
the while pumping you for information. Afterward, I would take you to your hotel, wherever that is.

April 23 is harder, as I will be in Pennsylvania that weekend helping a friend do 3D photograph in a
cave.

Bob____________________________________________________
See my books and essays at:
http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze3cxxp/zimbib.htm