Bug or change in CS5 Extendscript Toolkit debugger or parser

[Andreas Jansson]

I got a strange error beginning to work with a script in CS5 (that is working in CS4, and has a script version setting making it run as CS4).

This is what happened: Pressing Step into code in ExtendScript Toolkit. The window switches to InDesign CS5. Nothing happens. I switch back to the toolkit environment, and there is the blue circle spinning at the bottom right, but nothing else happens.

The status row reads: No Errors

So I press stop, and then the following is written out in the status row (Bottom left of the Extendscript Toolkit CS5):

Cannot execute

Execution halted : Adobe InDesign CS5 did not respond

Trying to debug this error was not easy, since the debugger never entered the code. But at last I found a row containing a comment like this one:

//var sResult = '<![CDATA[' + a + ']]>';

Please will someone else put this code in a new script and see if you get the same effect:

//var sResult = '<![CDATA[' + a + ']]>';

var sResult = 'test';

alert(sResult);

The alert box is not showing up.

You can even minimize the code to this row in a script:

// ']]>';

That single comment in a script makes my debugger hang.

I hope there are no other secret character combinations that need to be removed for my script to run in CS5... Continuing my tests now.

[Jongware]

That's bad ...

You can even minimize the code to this row in a script:

// ']]>';

Is it this exact sequence of characters (do the quotes matter, for example), or can it be shortened?

It's remotely possible the cause is the actual sequence character ]]> because that might get picked up by some XML processing mechanism.

(It's a good thing I don't use the ESTK to write my scripts with. And I don't use CS5 either -- and, come to think of it, what's this "debugging" thing you mentioned?)

[Andreas Jansson]

> because that might get picked up by some XML processing mechanism.

That's my best guess as well. The quotes doesn't matter.

(Debugging... hmmm... I shouldn't talk loud about that here, should I? 😉

Normally I use my Remington typewriter, and send the code to the office for OCR - no bugs, ever - just this CS5 upgrade thing...)

[brettpolo]

Just tried this with ESTK, ScriptBay, and running the script from the script panel, and it hung every time. (CS5, Mac)

As you said, it runs fine in ESTK CS4.

I know that InDesign, at least CS5, returns <![CDATA[]]> in some cases if you try to access a bad property.

for instance, if you have an XML object, myXML, with three elements,

//CS5
myXML.length() //returns 3
myXML.length //returns <![CDATA[]]>
//CS4
myXML.length() //returns 3
myXML.length //returns nothing, passes over the command with error

It's not only XML objects that do this, just happens to be the example I had on hand.  I'm also not sure why it hangs on // ']]>';

/dan

[Andreas Jansson]

Great, then it's not just on my computer. The Indesign team ought to take a look at this bug...

Best regards,

Andreas

[Peter Kahrel]

Please report it here: http://www.adobe.com/misc/bugreport.html

If you don't report bugs they don't get fixed.

Peter

[Andreas Jansson]

Yes, I already did that - with a link to this thread.

Thanks,

Andreas

[kimberleyhansen]

A note from the future: this error still occurs in June 2012.  If you put a space between the ']'s, however (like so: '] ]'), error no longer occurs and bob's your uncle.

[Laubender]

@Andreas – I also ran into this bug a couple of months ago. However, I do not see this bug in the latest ESTK for InDesign CS6. Also, if I use the latest ESTK in conjunction with CS5.5 or CS5 I cannot provoke this error.

Seems this bug is fixed…

Here is some code to provoke this bug with ESTK 3.5.1.59 and InDesign CS5.5 v7.5.3:

//A text frame with a table is selected:
_Provoke_C_DATA_Error();
function _Provoke_C_DATA_Error(){
    var _d = app.activeDocument;
    var _table = app.selection[0].parentStory.tables[0];
    var _columns = _table.columns.everyItem().getElements();  
    for(var c = 0;c<1;c++){
        var _cells = _columns[0].cells.everyItem().getElements();        
        for(var n=_cells.length-1;n>0;n--){
            //Provokes C-DATA-Error with InDesign CS5 ESTK or InDesign CS5.5 ESTK 
            //together with InDesign CS5.5 and InDesign CS6:
            $.writeln(_cells.contents);
            };
        };
}; //Function _Provoke_C_DATA_Error END

Uwe

[Laubender]

I have to resurrect this old thread.
I wrote "Seems this bug is fixed". As I wrote this more than three years ago I was right according to the shown C-DATA-Error in my snippet.

But I was wrong about the problem Andreas had detected:

// "]]>";

ESTK CC v4.0.0.1 (ExtendScript 4.5.5) is still running an endless loop, if one is using such a statement and runs the script from the ESTK.

There are some workarounds I found:

// 1. Add an empty string before the expression:

$.writeln(""+"]]>"); 
// 2. Escape one of the three characters:

$.writeln("]]\>"); 
// 3. Use the Unicode representation:

$.writeln("]]\u003E");

This old problem came up recently here:

ESTK: ']]>' macht Stress 😉

Martin Fischer

http://www.hilfdirselbst.ch/gforum/gforum.cgi?post=545025#545025

Uwe