GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 124932
Dubious data in IF equation causes loss of data
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
An equation of the form if(D5+E5,D5+E5," ") causes subsequent file saves to fail. The invoking terminal displays 'xmlEncodeEntitiesReentrant : input not UTF-8' upon saving. Somehow the file reverts more or less back to the stage at which the dodgy expression was entered into the sheet (ie all subseqeunt work is lost!). What I was trying to do was to display the sum of two cells, only if the cells contained valid data, otherwise I wanted to leave the cell blank (as opposed to showing zero as the cell was formatted as a 2 digit number). The equation editor finally allowed the above form and so I thought it was legal - it certainly behaved how I wanted on the screen, but not to the disk!
I cannot reproduce this. Can you come up with a specific and detailed recipe for getting this problem to occur?
Ideally a precise recipe of what you type and what locale you are running in. What version are you using ?
Please give us more information here. I'm loath to close these reports as 'insufficient information' but I also can not replicate them and do not want to hold up the release if they're phantom.
Sorry for the delay, the locale question led me to my old environment out of the backup disk. 1. I simply added a cell entry =if(D5+E5,D5+E5," "), but what I've since observed is unstable too, I'll attach the file next. You can try the changes on the third sheet ("1 Bank"). On the night in question I did lots of reformatting (adding shading, deleting shading, changing column widths) and generally mucking about with that sheet and finally saved after about 25 mins. When I later re-loaded the file my changes subsequent to the equation entry had been lost. 2. I appear to be running in a locale-less environment! The file was previously modified on an RH-7.3 system with gnumeric-1.0.5-3 and LC_ALL=en_US in force (originally created on a 0.6?? version of gnumeric around Jan '02). The current environment is SL-9.0. 3. I've tried setting LC_ALL to en_US & properly to en_GB.UTF-8. Same complaint to the terminal (which I think doesn't relate to this bug). 4. I see differing behaviour depending if I start a completely new file (and just add a couple of cells) and if I use my original file. With the original file, the save & re-load changes the cell contents from =if(D5+E5,D5+E5," ") to =if(D5+E5,D5+E5). That doesn't happen when testing with a totally blank file. 5. I'm not sure that this bug is repeatable enough to warrant tracking down.
Created attachment 20871 [details] Gnumeric spreadsheet (created 21 months ago and modified with various versions of gnumeric)
You're just seeing random results dues to the corrupt data in there. We need to be more explicit warning about these problems when we see them, but I suspect that all the random behavior you are seeing stems from the corrupt formats. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 124930 ***