NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE - Issues attaching documents to Invoices/etc. when the filename contains NNBSP

[Charles Turner]

Hi All,

First time making a post here, after pulling my hair out for a good couple of days around an issue relating to SBDDesktop crashing when attempting to attach files to invoices.

There doesn't seem to be any discussion about this specific issue, and about issues attaching files to invoices in general seem vague at best. I am posting here with the hope that if the issue can't be rectified, other users will at least be able resolve the issue themselves.

While attaching the files in question to sage, SBDDesktop would instantly hang, with no error or any other indicator as to what the issue was, I initially tried renaming the file to a single word, attaching now worked. I then removed the spaces from the original filename, and attaching worked causing me to incorrectly believe that sage could not handle spaces in filenames, this turned out not to be the case when another file, including several spaces attached without issue.

Looking deeper into the filename, I inspected the specific Unicode characters and found that the filename contained U+202F, which is known as a Narrow No-Break Space and is commonly used in OSX and iOS timestamps between the time and the AM/PM. NNBSP is visually indistinguishable from a regular space, and does not cause other applications to crash when opening files containing NNBSP, making it particularly hard to pin down.

Throwing the filename into a Unicode inspector suck as the below will reveal it however.

What Unicode character is this ? (babelstone.co.uk)

 

TL/DR: Sage does not accept filenames containing NNBSP, a character found in Apple device timestamps. Files containing Apple timestamps will cause SBDDesktop to crash and will need renaming to remove NNBSPs

[Steel, Mark]

Hi @Charles Turner,

"issue relating to SBDDesktop crashing" - This is not related to Sage Business Cloud Accounting and relates to a Sage 50 Desktop product not supported in the developer community.

If you require support for a UK Sage 50 Integration issue you'll need to contact [email protected] 

Thanks

Mark