I was going to post a reply to a message in a public board which included a link. I didnt think much of it until this message popped up on the screen:


"Illegal to apply low ASCII character in the text."

I looked over the message again, because I thought the link might contain the ASCII character for the combine "AE" from the word 'AEtherverse', but didn't see any such thing, so I tried to post a second time and that time it went through fine.

Honestly this is a kind of minor thing and I am just bringing it up cause I have nothing better to do, but I thought you all ought to know just in case it's a symptom of a larger problem...

Is it possible the post included a tab character?  That's the most common cause of that error, I think.

Got the message again a few hours later, also when posting a link. Still no idea if it was at tab in the text or what.

I think the error you would have received was "Illegal low ASCII character in the message!" (or subject).

Your copy and paste includes a control code, which could be a horizontal tab (as cruinne wisely suggested) but could also be a vertical tab (yes, there is such a thing), start of text, null, bell, or form feed, to name a few.

Horizontal tabs can be easy to miss because they look like a space or bunch of spaces, but they shouldn't be in hyperlinks.

The second link I posted was a link from this site, so I have no idea what would be causing that since I am sure you would not put 'illegal' characters into the site's own page system...

Could be the browser doing it rather than RPOL. I have the problem with non-breaking spaces when I copy stat blocks from PDFs and I end up having a message 17 miles long because the spaces won't go to the next line. I believe that one is either my PDF program, or my browser.
This message was last edited by the user at 16:15, Thu 19 Feb 2015.

I guess we're a little stuck: without being able to see exactly what you're pasting, it's hard to tell what's causing the problem.  But if you can't successfully post it to RPoL, then it's hard for you to show us.

Are you composing your posts in a word processing suite, by any chance?


What I'd do (and others may have better suggestions to help you sort out the cause of the problem):

1. Grab a copy of notepad++ (a free text editor that allows you see "non-printing characters") or a similar program.
   
   
   
2. Paste the thing that's causing you issues into it.
   
   
   
3. Under Edit choose "Show Symbol" then "Show White Space and TAB".
   
   
   
4. Look for marks that indicate things "out of the ordinary", such as a thin, long red arrow for a tab character, or a control character (usually shown in a black background), such as ESC or EOT.

This message was last edited by the user at 18:00, Thu 19 Feb 2015.

If it happens again I will try that, thanks.

Oh, and FYI, both times it has happened after I got the error message I posted it a second time and it went through: is there some kind of auto-correct feature I don't know about?

curious if you ever tried going and Recopying the same links and post a duplicate post of what you did before in a test thread (perhaps even here?) to see if the same thing happens when you do it from the beginning fresh?

We get this a lot at work - users cut n paste the text they want into the textbox on the form and unbeknownst to them, they've grabbed a few trailing spaces or paragraph markers or something, so we have to trim the string to ensure we've got text only.

Alexi, I suspect when you're highlighting the link you could be picking up some trailing non-visible characters, which you don't get when you copy it again (may only be one of a few non-visible characters, so if you miss the offending one it works, if you don't it doesn't).

In addition to cruinne's suggestion above, if all that fails to shed light, type yourself two easily distinguishable letters into the notepad++ or whatever you're using - I use two capital XXs generally, then paste your copied text in between the two letters - the start and end of your copied text should be hard up against both Xs - if you see spaces either end, then there could be something in those non-visible characters - might be inoffensive spaces, but might not.
This message was last edited by the user at 03:22, Sat 21 Feb 2015.

Thanks for that tip, if there are any more problems I will give that a try.