Parsing File Error

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Michael6

My file has crashed with no backup... I go to open it and it says "An error occurred while parsing file at line 845, column 70760235: Unexpected". There is a weeks work in this file I am hoping to recover.  Anyone have the ability to recover it from the last autosave or something similar? It would be greatly appreciated!  :o

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utnik

hi michael

is the 'autosave' file showing the same message? – if it does, it might be hard to recover the file.
when you show me the file, i will take a look at it and try to recognize the error. if the damage is small, i might be able to just delete some affected objects. but there's no guarantee, as i'm not a coder and crashes can do strange things...

utnik

p.s.: the combination of 'a week of work' and 'no backup' should lead to the main lesson to be learned from this crash!

AdmFubar

Out of curiosity, how old is the system you are using? I suspect your hard drive might be going.
Using Scribus 1.6.1, openSUSE 15.5
Advanced hobbyist

Michael6

Thanks Utnik, I sent you a PM to try and exchange the file.

My computer is only 2 years old AdmFubar.

The same error occurred on another document I would have had opened the same time. Didn't know that until I tried to open it after my post. That one was easy to redo. Really hope I can salvage something from the main file :(

dragonfly

#4
I offer some ideas I have applied to recover corrupted files (not just Scribus).

First make a backup of the errant file, as an insurance policy.

Next download and install XMLCopyEditor a free XML editor.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/xml-copy-editor/

With the original document file safely backed up, open a copy of the *.sla document in XMLCopyEditor.

Since *.sla is really *.xml format you should be able to inspect the inner elements of your file.

There are two buttons in top menu showing "yellow ticks".
Check well-formedness
Validate

Check first that the document is "well-formed" (that is, it follows syntax rules).
Check next that the document is valid.

If one of these fail it may be that the xml syntax is corrupted.

It then becomes a process of trial and error to eliminate corrupt elements in the xml document.

I use a blank template Scribus document as a reference for comparison. That is, a Scribus template without content in pages. 

You can also compare Scribus XML documents (old and current document versions) using meld.
https://meldmerge.org/

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[P.S] I see another related thread here which might offer more recovery ideas (such as splitting up the source document):

http://forums.scribus.net/index.php/topic,3655.15.html

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[P.P.S] Another idea is to comment out blocks of xml elements in the test *.sla document to identify which page or attributes or corrupt syntax might be at fault.

More found here ..

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2757396/how-do-i-comment-out-a-block-of-tags-in-xml



utnik

#5
i had a look at the file. it ended inside a really big embedded .psd image (around 100 megabytes). this image wasn't closed. it might have been even bigger – and could be the source of the crash...
i couldn't really recover the file. i removed the broken image and added the closing lines for a valid .xml file. the file is readable again but the part of code below the image is lost.

utnik