Hidden tab character in quoted string in app of a sudden

[Jamal]

This is related to VO 2,8 SP4 (2838) and not if a Windows updates started causes it.

For a few weeks, when running an application, many hard coded string such as:

"View all future trips for this passenger?" are displayed as:

2020-08-13_12-11-34.jpg (16.39 KiB) Viewed 421 times

are displayed spaces. Upon investigation with NotePad++ and in the View menu, Show Symbol , Show White Space and Tab, I see the following something like this:

2020-08-13_11-55-44.jpg (39.22 KiB) Viewed 421 times

In all the years I've used VO, this never happend.

And now while checking if the VO editor is somehow is inserting the tab character and pressed CTRL-SHIFT-T which Toggles white space (See Edit menu, Advanced, Toggle White Space) and saw the following:

2020-08-13_12-01-41.jpg (6.62 KiB) Viewed 421 times

Note the >> after the View word.

How can a such bizarre thing happen? I know that VO is no longer supported and this post may feel like useless, but if someone runs into it, you'll know why. Now I have to check all quoted strings which could be in the hundreds if not thousands across several applications.

Jamal

[Chris]

Hi Jamal,

Only thing I could imagine is that those tabs have always been there in the code, but some change in the window settings or a window update as you said has triggered them to become "visible" in the dialogs at runtime.

One relatively easy way to search for tabs in strings is to export all your apps, port them all with VOXporter, then open the XIDE project and do a global search for tabs, with the setting to search only inside strings to on. This will quickly tell you in how many and exactly in which places you have such string literals with tabs in the code.

[Jamal]

Hi Chris,

Thanks! I will try your recommendation and see how it goes.

Jamal

[ic2]

Hello Jamal,

I remember that I've seen that too, years ago I suppose. Part of the spaces in strings (I think in only a few mef's) were replaced by tabs. I've tried to search my documentation but haven't found it yet. I think I manually changed them back but it hasn't reoccurred since.

Dick

[Jamal]

Hi Dick,

I found a small trick instead of changing the strings manually one by one.

I right click on the module, then choose Edit all source in module", then highlight all the code. then click the Edit menu, Advanced, and select Untabify. That removed the tabs!

I still don't know how that happend. May be I triggered it by mistake using a hidden key combination.