«Inconsistent Line Ending» in Visual Studio when editing from outside VS - visual-studio

I have written a script that checks out a file that changes a value in a line of a file and checks in the code. But after that when I open the file it gives me a popup
Inconsistent line Ending
The Line endings in the following file are
not consistent. Do you want to normalize the line ending.
Is there a way to avoid this? When I compare I do not see any difference. Would it cause any issues for compiling the program?

The problem you met is about a different endline encoding. I bet that the script you wrote for changing files insert a line ending like \n. It is a «*nix» notation, usually also called «LF». Windows notation for a newline for some (I guess historic) reason requires two characters, it is called «CR/LF». That is, you need in your script insert not just the \n, but \r\n. Just for you interest, there is also just «CR» notation, i.e. \r — it was used in older MACs.
The message you see complains about the fact, that a file now have different line endings. That is, every line in the file was most likely in «CR/LF», and now there's a line in another notation. You ought to have the same line notation throughout the file, with disregard would it be «Unix», «MAC», or «Windows» one.
When I compare I do not see any difference.
It is non-printable characters, and usually not shown in text-diff utilities.
Would it cause any issues for compiling the program?
Hardly it could cause any compile problems. Anyway, now you know what is the problem, and how to fix it.

This is the code i used in powershell to
$enc = New-Object System.Text.UTF8Encoding( $false ) # required to save the file with UTF8 Without BOM
$wrt = New-Object System.XML.XMLTextWriter( $phyicalPath, $enc )
$wrt.Formatting = 'Indented'
$webconfig.Save($wrt)
$wrt.Close()
(Get-Content $phyicalPath)|Set-Content -Path $phyicalPath -Force # normalize line ending

Related

Weird txt behavior

I have a centos server. I cloned a GitHub repository. And I have .txt file in that repository which contains 1 line. For some reason it does that:
[root#0-0-0-0 Some]# cat some.txt
some text[root#0-0-0-0 Some]#
And also while read i; do echo "$i"; done < some.txt don't see that line. What could cause that? And how to avoid it. If I edit it with vim adding a new line and then deleting that new line (so it still contains only one line) it starts to work properly.
The text file has no newline character at the end of it. Some programs will treat it as a valid text file whose last line doesn't happen to end in a newline. Others (apparently including bash's built-in read command, at least by default) will treat it as invalid, and perhaps ignore the last line (which isn't considered a "line" because it's not marked as one).
vim's default behavior is to quietly add a newline to the end of a file if you modify and save it.
You can add a newline to a file that lacks one by editing it with vim (or another editor that behaves similarly), or by adding it from the shell:
echo '' >> some.txt
In general, it's a good idea to ensure that text files end in a newline character in the first place, at least if they're intended to be used on UNIX-like systems.

InstallScript GetLine() can not read text file contains result from command prompt

My Installation needs to check the result of a command from cmd.exe. Thus, I redirect the result of the command to a text file and then try to read the file to get the result as follows:
// send command to cmd to execute and redirect the result to a text file
// try to read the file
szDir = "D:\\";
szFileName = "MyFile.txt";
if Is(FILEEXISTS, szDir ^ szFileName) then
listID = ListCreate(STRINGLIST);
if listID != LIST_NULL then
if OpenFIleMode(FILE_MODE_NORMAL) = 0 then
if OpenFile(nFileHandle, szDir, szFileName) = 0 then
// I run into problem here
while (GetLine(nFileHandle, szCurLine) = 0 )
ListAddString(listID, szCurLine, AFTER);
endwhile;
CloseFile(nFileHandle);
endif;
endif;
endif;
endif;
The problem is that right after the command prompt is executed and the result is redirected to MyFile.txt, I can set open file mode, open the file but I can not read any text into my list. ListReadFromFile() does not helps. If I open the file, edit and save it manually, my script works.
After debugging, I figured that GetLine() returns an error code (-1) which means the file pointer must be at the end of file or other errors. However, FILE_MODE_NORMAL sets the file as read only and SET THE FILE POINTER AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FILE.
What did I possibly do wrong? Is this something to do with read/write access of the file? I tried this command without result:
icacls D:\MyFile.txt /grant Administrator:(R,W)
I am using IstallShield 2018 and Windows 10 64-bit btw. Your help is much appreciated.
EDIT 1: I suspected the encoding and tried a few things:
After running "wslconfig /l", the content of MyFile.txt opened in Notepad++ is without an encoding, but still appeared normal and readable. I tried to converted the content to UTF-8 but it did not work.
If I add something to the file (echo This line is appended >> MyFile.txt), the encoding changed to UTF-8, but the content in step 1 is changeed also. NULL (\0) is added to between every character and even repelace new line character. Maybe this is why GetLine() failed to read the file.
Work around: after step 1, I run "find "my_desired_content" MyFile.txt" > TempFile.txt and read TempFile.txt (which is encoded in UTF-8).
My ultimate goal is to check if "my_desired_content" apeears in the result of "wslconfig /l" so this is fine. However, what I don't understand is that both MyFile.txt and TempFile.txt are created from cmd command but they are encoded differently?
The problem is due to the contents of the file. Assuming this is the file generated by your linked question, you can examine its contents in a hex editor to find out the following facts:
Its contents are encoded in UTF-16 (LE) without a BOM
Its newlines are encoded as CR or CR CR instead of CR LF
I thought the newlines would be more important than the text encoding, but it turns out I had it backwards. If I change each of these things independently, GetLine seems to function correctly for either CR, CR CR, or CR LF, but only handles UTF-16 when the BOM is present. (That is, in a hex editor, the file starts with FF FE 57 00 instead of 57 00 for a file starting with the character W.)
I'm at a bit of a loss for the best way to address this. If you're up for a challenge, you could read the file with FILE_MODE_BINARYREADONLY, and can use your extra knowledge about what should be in the file to ensure you interpret its encoding correctly. Note that for most of UTF-16, you can create a single code unit by combining two bytes in the following manner:
szResult[i] = (nHigh << 8) + nLow;
where nHigh and nLow are probably values like szBuffer[2*i + 1] and szBuffer[2*i], assuming you filled a STRING szBuffer by calling ReadBytes.
Other unproven ideas include editing it in binary to ensure the BOM (FF FE) is present, figuring out ways to ensure the file is originally created with the BOM, figuring out ways to create it in an alternate encoding, finding another command you can invoke to "fix" the file, or lodging a request with the vendor (my employer) and hoping the development team changes something to better handle this case.
Here's an easier workaround. If you can safely assume that the command will append UTF-16 characters without a signature, you can append this output to a file that has just a signature. How do you get such a file?
You could create a file with just the BOM in your development environment, and add it to your Support Files. If you need to use it multiple times, copy it around first.
You could create it with code. Just call the following (error checking omitted for clarity)
OpenFileMode(FILE_MODE_APPEND_UNICODE);
CreateFile(nFileHandle, szDir, szFileName);
CloseFile(nFileHandle);
and if szDir ^ szFileName didn't exist, it will now be a file with just the UTF-16 signature.
Assuming this file is called sig.txt, you can then invoke the command
wslconfig /l >> sig.txt to write to that file. Note the doubled >> for append. The resulting file will include the Unicode signature you created ahead of time, plus the Unicode data output from wslconfig, and GetLine should interpret things correctly.
The biggest problem here is that this hardcodes around the behavior of wslconfig, and that behavior may change at any point. This is why Christopher alludes to recommending an API, and I agree completely. In the mean time, You could try to make this more robust by invoking it in a cmd /U (but my understanding of what that does or guarantees is fuzzy at best), or by trying the original way and then with the BOM.
This whole WSL thing is pretty new. I don't see any APIs it but rather then screen scrapping command outputs you might want to look at this registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss
It seems to have the list of installed distros that come from the store. Coming from the store probably explains why this is HKCU and not HKLM.
A brave new world.... sigh.

Windows Perl --> Unix not working after port, possible encoding issue

I've got a Perl program that I wrote on Windows. It starts with:
$unused_header = <STDIN>;
my #header_fields = split('\|\^\|', $unused_header, -1);
Which should split input that consists of a very large file of:
The|^|Quick|^|Brown|^|Fox|!|
Into:
{The, Quick, Brown, Fox|!|}
Note: This line just does the headre alone, theres another one like it to do the repetitive data lines.
It worked great on windows, but on linux it fails. However, if I define a string with the same contents within Perl, and run the split on that, it works fine.
I think it's a UTF-16 encoding handling issue, but I'm not sure how to handle it. Does anyone know how I can get perl to understand the UTF-16 being piped into STDIN?
I found: http://www.haboogo.com/matching_patterns/2009/01/utf-16-processing-issue-in-perl.html but I'm not sure what to do with it.
If STDIN is UTF-16, use one of the following
binmode(STDIN, ':encoding(UTF-16le)'); # Byte order used by Windows.
binmode(STDIN, ':encoding(UTF-16be)'); # The other byte order.
binmode(STDIN, ':encoding(UTF-16)'); # Use BOM to determine byte order.
Tom has written a lengthy answer with regards to perl and unicode. It contains some bolierplate code to properly and fully support UTF-8, but you can replace with UTF-16 as needed.
I doubt it's a UTF-xx encoding issue, as neither Windows Perl nor Unix Perl will try to read data with those encodings unless you tell it to.
If the Unix script is reading the exact same file as the Windows script but behaves differently, maybe it's a line-ending issue. The dos2unix command on most Unix-y systems can change the line endings on a file, or you can strip off the line-endings yourself in the Perl script
$unused_header = <STDIN>;
$unused_header =~ s/\r?\n$//; # chop \r\n (Windows) or \n (Unix)

What changes when a file is saved in Kedit for windows that the unix2dos command doesn't do?

So I have a strange question. I have written a script that re-formats data files. I basically create new files with the right column order, spacing, and such. I then unix2dos these files (the program I am formatting these files for is DIPS for windows, and I assume that the files should be ansi). When I go to open the files in the DIPS Program however an error occurs and the file won't open.
When I create the same kind of data file through the DIPS program and open it in note pad, it matches exactly with the data files I have created with my script.
On the other hand if I open the data files that I have created with my script in Kedit first, save them, and then open them in the DIPS program everything works.
My question is what could saving in Kedit possibly do that unix2dos does not?
(Also if I try using note pad or word pad to save instead of Kedit the file doesn't open in DIPS)
Here is what was created using the diff command in unix
"
1,16c1,16
* This file is generated by Dips for Windows.
* The following 2 lines are the Title of this file.
Cobre Panama
Drill Hole B11106-GT
Number of Traverses: 0
Global Orientation is:
DIP/DIPDIRECTION
0.000000 (Declination)
NO QUANTITY
Number of extra columns are: 0
--
* This file is generated by Dips for Windows.
* The following 2 lines are the Title of this file.
Cobre Panama
Drill Hole B11106-GT
Number of Traverses: 0
Global Orientation is:
DIP/DIPDIRECTION
0.000000 (Declination)
NO QUANTITY
Number of extra columns are: 0
18c18
--
440c440
--
442c442
-1
-1
"
Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
Okay! Figured it out.
Simply when you unix2dos your file you do not strip any space characters in between the last letter in a line and the line break character. When saving in Kedit you do strip the spaces between the last letter in a line and the line break character.
In my script I had a poor programing practice in which I was writing a string like this;
echo "This is an example string " >> outfile.txt
The character count is 32, and if you could see the break line character (chr(10)) the line would read;
This is an example string
If you unix2dos outfile.txt the line looks the same as above but with a different break line character. However when you place the file into Kedit and save it, now the character count is 25 and the line looks like this;
This is an example string
This occurs because Kedit does not preserve spaces at the end of a line. It places the return or line break character at the last letter or "non space" character in a line.
So programs that read literal input like DIPS (i'm guessing) or more widely used AutoCAD scripting will have a real problem with extra spaces before the return character. Basically in AutoCAD scripting a space in a line is treated as a return character. So if you have ten extra spaces at the end of a line it's treated the same as ten returns instead of the one you probably intended.
OH and if this helped you out or though it was good please give me a vote up!
unix2dos converts the line-break characters at the end of each line, from unix line breaks (10) to dos line breaks (13, 10)
Kedit could possible change the encoding of the file (like from ansi to UTF-8)
You can change the encoding of a file with the iconv utility (on a linux box)

What's with Ruby's ZipInputStream screwing up my line endings?

I'd be happy with ZipInputStream taking indecent liberties with the line endings that are stored in a file if it would at least get them right for the platform I'm storing the file on. Unfortunately, I pull a text file (.txt, .cpp. .etc.) out of a zip and the \n (0x0A) gets replaced with a \r\n (0x0d0a) and, as you can imagine, this is causing me a great deal of trouble.
Is there a flag I can set to tell it either to avoid changing the line endings altogether or to use one of my choosing?
Thanks.
(I've checked the zip file, my creation of it, etc. I've extracted it using other zip tools and verified that it is archived properly. I've stepped through my project with rdebug and seen that the ZipInputStream call to read() is returning \r\n for line endings.)
if you have an open(filename) or open(filename,"r") call in your code, try to replace it with open(filename,"rb")

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