Re: Malformed sav file - need help for investigation

[Ignácz , István]

Thanks, Ben for the quick response!

Yes, the ultimate goal is to add a patch to the package which fixes the
problem or throws an error if the user of the package (in this case me)
provides invalid input. I think I'm facing the later.

One significant difference between the test file and my case is that in my
case no variables and no cases are recognized so the reading process
basically crashes.
I think I've found the part where the PSPP ends up in a 'goto error'
(sys-file-reader.813) but I lack the context of what's going on here. I
guess the value labels could be misconfigured? Maybe there's a value in a
record that doesn't have a label in the variable settings?

If I would know a little bit more about what happens in that part and why
that causes an error, maybe I could force my (and tiamo's) code to reliably
produce the error.

Thanks,
István

On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 at 18:51, Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu> wrote:

> I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but PSPP has a test case
> that intentionally provokes this error message. I'm attaching the file it
> produces.
>
> I guess the ultimate goal here should be to fix tiamo's package?
>
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 9:42 AM Ignácz, István <istvan.ignacz@neticle.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I think this is not the usual topic on this list, excuse me if you find it
>> off-topic.
>>
>> I'm facing a tough bug in my software and I'm looking for some help to be
>> able to take the next steps.
>>
>> Our software generates sav files via tiamo's package:
>> https://packagist.org/packages/tiamo/spss
>> Usually, everything works fine, but in some cases, we generate malformed
>> files. In this case, SPSS crashes without any notice, however, PSPP at
>> least gives a useful error message:
>> Variable index n refers to long string continuation.
>>
>> I cannot reproduce this issue on my side, so I tried to reverse engineer
>> the PSPP codebase to find any cases when it could occur. So far not with
>> much luck.
>>
>> Could you help me with some example cases?
>>
>> Thanks for your help,
>> István
>>
>

-- 

*István Ignácz*
Software Engineer @ Neticle

+36 30 460 5356
istvan.ignacz@neticle.com
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