Database suddenly chops off/truncatesmy page content

  • Resolved dmitcha

    (@dmitcha)


    13 years, 8 months ago

    Two weeks ago, my site suddenly stopped working. My post Tabs and Improved Include Pages combination no longer delivered pages reliably. Last night, I began the upgrade process and discovered the same problem after gradually getting to 3.1.

    The database is shortening the content of all of my longer pages. When I open my database back-up in Notepad ++, I see the full content there.

    But no matter what I do, when I do the update, then am forced to update the database, half of the page content gets eaten.

    I reinstalled my backup of 2.6, but it still forces me to update the database, and sure enough, all content is cut in half.

    I have disabled and one-by-one activated all of the plugins. Improved Include Pages no longer works in 3.1.

    But my content is being affected at the database level. I have tried importing it again using Big Dump, but the long posts still get cut off.

    I have manually copied and pasted from my dump file, and the full text appears on the page (along with endless /r’s and /n’s.

    Questions:

    -Does anyone know why the database eats long posts suddenly? I see lots of posts, but they all seem to be on the wp side, not the db side

    -Does anyone know a way to copy and paste from the backup file without grabbing all of the special characters? I will do this manually just to get up and running again. Thanks!

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  • Thread Starter dmitcha

    (@dmitcha)

    Figured it out. A multi-step process.

    1) Returned to 3.1 – once I saw that the posts were chopped in both 2.6 and 3.1, I returned to 3.1 to fix it in the current version.

    2) Troubleshooting Include Pages – I was getting all of the errors from Improved Include Pages. It did work to stop using the page ID and use the page path (local); it fed the data. BUT, the error codes in shortcode.php would not go away in IE and Chrome (FF breezed through). So turning off my wonderful IIP plugin fixed those (and bummed me out). Then I had to take the time to copy and paste the text from all of those pages into my post Tab pages

    3) Troubleshooting truncation – everything I read suggested I was having special character problems, and the database was deleting all data after the first special character. I first tried opening my giant dmp file in Notepad++ and manually replacing the random em dashes and quotes. Then I read further and found out that my db export was opening as ANSI in NP++. So after a gazillion re-imports that failed, I went back to that original db backup file, opened it in NP++, then converted and encoded as NSF without BOM. Re-imported, and all of my text showed up.

    4) Lessons learned – I was incredibly glad I had carefully backed up everything, including exporting a backup of my db before I started this. But the database update would have done me in, regardless, if I hadn’t figured out the character set problems. So that was great.

    One other quick tip – renaming folders is magical so you don’t have to keep copying and deleting files via FTP. When plugins don’t let you launch dashboard, just rename the folder so it can’t be launched. Same with the updates. I didn’t delete anything for the update; I just renamed the first blog folder “blog 2-6,” then uploaded the new 3.1 to my wordpress folder. Then I copied over the files I needed from 2.6. Great news is, when I wanted to switch back, it was simple to rename the 3.1 folder to “blog 3-1,” then switch “blog 2-6” to the folder entitled “blog.” Phew.

    I have been having the same issues and I also use NP++. Usually, I can see where some sort of special character initiated the cutoff point, however, lately I have not really noticed anything unusual to trigger the cutoff point?

    If I may ask a [silly?] question, I do not see an option to encode as NSF without BOM? Is this the same as “Encode in UTF-8 without BOM” option? Or do I use “Convert to UTF-8 without BOM”?

    This is really driving me nuts as it is adding a lot of lost time to correct these issues after importing.

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