Header Bar separators show weird characters in main browsers

12 posts by 3 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: November 4, 2022   (RSS)

By pgplast - October 9, 2022

I have for some time noticed that when I create separators of the Header Bar type in my tables, their text renders in weird characters.

This behavior is seen in Chrome and Firefox (on Mac), but not in Safari.

I am attaching a screen shot from the two offending browsers.

This is not an issue on php pages that have improper charset designations, but  happens within the CMS when one looks at a record for any section with a Header Bar separator.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

pgplast

Attachments:

Chars.png 212K

By daniel - October 10, 2022

Hi pgplast,

What version of CMSB are you running? Also, what is the correct text that should be displayed in the header bar?

Thanks,

Daniel
Technical Lead
interactivetools.com

By pgplast - October 11, 2022 - edited: October 11, 2022

Hi Daniel:

I am running v. 3.56

The Header bar should say "Section 1: Activity Description"

However, all of the header bars on all the sections have this Greek stuff no matter what they are set to say.

However, the plot thickens. I now see that when I access the admin area on other computers, the text is rendered correctly.

Can you think of a computer-specific reason for only the header bars rendering incorrectly?

Thajks.

Philip

By Dave - October 12, 2022

Hi Philip, 

I'd check for specific charset preferences being sent by your browser or server.

You can check which headers your browser is sending here: 
https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-http-headers-is-my-browser-sending

And check which headers a server is sending back here: 
https://smallseotools.com/get-http-headers/

Also, you can see the headers being sent and received in Chrome: https://stackoverflow.com/a/70482284

I'd also be curious if a firewall or proxy is modifying the content.  It's odd that only the header bar is being shown differently.  You could try viewing source on the page and see if the HTML content is different than expected.

Hope that helps, let us know what you find.  That's a curious one!

Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

By pgplast - October 30, 2022

My browser yeilds:

ACCEPT text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
ACCEPT-ENCODING gzip, deflate, br
ACCEPT-LANGUAGE en-GB,en;q=0.5
CONTENT-LENGTH
CONTENT-TYPE
COOKIE __utma=12798129.555919700.1667145402.1667145402.1667145402.1; __utmb=12798129.2.9.1667145406954; __utmc=12798129; __utmz=12798129.1667145402.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); __utmt=1; __gads=ID=7529ba71a35f7876-2282f13187d6009f:T=1667145402:RT=1667145402:S=ALNI_Mb5SOyiwp5rRbKXa9jwnJqU4oGB-Q; __gpi=UID=000008ea40ab866e:T=1667145402:RT=1667145402:S=ALNI_MZe_k7h58WHHSOcJ6LFIdzrRUmSWA
HOST www.whatismybrowser.com
REFERER https://www.interactivetools.com/
SEC-FETCH-DEST document
SEC-FETCH-MODE navigate
SEC-FETCH-SITE cross-site
SEC-FETCH-USER ?1
TE trailers
UPGRADE-INSECURE-REQUESTS 1
USER-AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:106.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/106.0

When I use Chrome to check headers on a page that is showing the weird gibberish I find only the following:

. Request URL: https://test.nypqcme.org/cmsCSoft/admin.php?menu=cme_programs&action=edit&num=4233
. Request Method: GET
. Status Code: 200 OK
. Remote Address: 67.227.248.142:443
. Referrer Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
. Response HeadersView source
. Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
. Connection: Keep-Alive
. Content-Encoding: gzip
. Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
. Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2022 16:01:30 GMT
. Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
. Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
. Pragma: no-cache
. Server: Apache
. Set-Cookie: cms_54eb6_loginsession=%3D0HM5YTN0EzN2YTM6IyczV2YjFEdzFGbiwiI2gDM4QWZ0UmNwIzM5AjYiFzM2E2NhZzM1IjYwczY5EzYhJmN0cDOkRSMhh2ckIiOig2chhEZy92dzNXYwJCLiQ3chxGcnBnI6ISZtFmbyV2c1Jye; expires=Mon, 04-Jan-2038 00:00:00 GMT; Max-Age=479030310; path=/; secure; HttpOnly
. Set-Cookie: cms_54eb6_loginsession=%3D0HM5YTN0EzN2YTM6IyczV2YjFEdzFGbiwiI2gDM4QWZ0UmNwIzM5AjYiFzM2E2NhZzM1IjYwczY5EzYhJmN0cDOkRSMhh2ckIiOig2chhEZy92dzNXYwJCLiQ3chxGcnBnI6ISZtFmbyV2c1Jye; expires=Mon, 04-Jan-2038 00:00:00 GMT; Max-Age=479030310; path=/; secure; HttpOnly
. Transfer-Encoding: chunked
. Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
. Request HeadersView source
. Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
. Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
. Accept-Language: en-GB,en-US;q=0.9,en;q=0.8
. Cache-Control: no-cache
. Connection: keep-alive
. Cookie: cms_54eb6_PHPSESSID=27ea4fc80e7e9f23c203ea27c792b836; web_54eb6_lastUrl=https%3A%2F%2Ftest.nypqcme.org%2Fdoctor_center.php; cms_54eb6_loginsession=%3D0XN0UTN0EzN2YTM6IyczV2YjFEdzFGbiwiI2gDM4QWZ0UmNwIzM5AjYiFzM2E2NhZzM1IjYwczY5EzYhJmN0cDOkRSMhh2ckIiOig2chhEZy92dzNXYwJCLiQ3chxGcnBnI6ISZtFmbyV2c1Jye
. Host: test.nypqcme.org
. Pragma: no-cache
. Referer: https://test.nypqcme.org/cmsCSoft/admin.php?menu=cme_programs
. sec-ch-ua: "Chromium";v="106", "Google Chrome";v="106", "Not;A=Brand";v="99"
. sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?1
. sec-ch-ua-platform: "Android"
. Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
. Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
. Sec-Fetch-Site: same-origin
. Sec-Fetch-User: ?1
. Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36

I confess that this is not of help to me.

pgplast

By Dave - October 31, 2022

Hi phplast, 

That all looks normal.  Charset is utf-8 and your language is set to english on both.

It's curious that it only happens on the one computer.  Might be worth checking for a firewall or browser/system plugin that is modifying things.  

What happens if you save the source of the problem page as "admin_test.html" to the same directory and view it?  Does it still have the issue?  The browser shouldn't really differentiate between the HTML output from PHP or from a static HTML page so that's one way to isolate issues.

Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

By pgplast - November 2, 2022

Hi Dave:

If I copy the page source to an new html file and upload it, the same problem persists.

pgplast

By Dave - November 4, 2022

Hi pgplast, 

Okay, that's great.  That means we can rule out PHP as the cause.  

Next, you want to remove content from the HTML page until you can create the smallest test case demonstrating the issue.  

This is how we isolate issues in HTML, we'll remove half the content, see if the problem still exists, if it doesn't we'll put that back and remove the other half, and so on.

Ideally we'll get down to a few lines of HTML that make the issue occur and then figure out the cause and solution.

Also, feel free to post or email me a link to the HTML file and I can see if I can spot anything.

Hope that helps!  I'm curious what this one will be.

Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

By pgplast - November 4, 2022

Dave:

It appears that when I comment out the following css reference, the problem goes away.

<link rel='stylesheet' type="text/css" href='/cmsCSoft/3rdParty/google-fonts/google-fonts.css'>

???

pgplast

By Dave - November 4, 2022

Hi pgplast, 

Okay, so I'd make a zip or backup of the /google-fonts/ folder, then replace it with a fresh copy from whichever version of CMSB you're using.  It may have been that one of those files got corrupted at some point.  

Alternatively, you can start reducing the amount of content in google-fonts.css to see if you can find the exact line where it's causing problems.

First off I'd just want to check that those files haven't been modified by malware or anything like that.  

Let me know what you find!

Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com