I've had a trawl through the buglist and noticed that other people have reported that gnc doesn't deal with newlines and similar plain text significant chars very well. Some of the formal responses are akin to "well, if it doesn't work don't do it, we're not interested", I think it is time to move on. To begin this part of the discussion I'll use an example: if a gnc generated .log file includes a newline in a Description field and one attempts File / Import / Replay GnuCash .log file it doesn't do what is says on the tin essentially gnc doesn't understand itself gnc doesn't know what is inside it's own files there is much to discuss: should gnc prevent the chars being in the file in the first place? should gnc be expected to understand the file it created? are we as humans expected to only put in the right chars? what if my government disagrees with me? Heh, skip the last one, governments don't care about newlines, but hopefully you get the idea. gnc doesn't appear to understand newlines although they are a significant part of xml, it allows them to be inserted in unexpected places and then doesn't understand what it has allowed to be stored when a tx is revisited. this is broken behaviour, either you don't allow stuff into your tx stream OR you allow stuff into your tx stream and deal with it gnc is fulfilling neither of those ideals. Discuss.
related stuff from this buglist, I am not giving any of them any significance, just pointing out that this is an ignored issue rather than one that is new https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354316 Editing nodes in Accounts tab shows newline as undisplayable. https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=576743 Can get newlines into account names https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=796761 Newline (char(10) is inserted into the end of the string if copy & paste text from excel into the description field of transaction The last one is interesting as both Geert and JohnR take part in the discussion but don't reach a conclusion about what to do about the problem.
I think the ability to do a round trip on any given set of tx should be significant in any open source accounting application. gnc fails at the moment. a base question is what to do? to help people think: we could stop the bad chars entering or we could understand them [1] [1] understanding the chars could be a bigger problem than you expect as emojis have extra meanings, etc. either: gnc places value on words and characters or gnc places no value on words or characters [2] [2] if you take that to the extreme gnc is no longer dealing with real people and their numbers.
I'm happy for this to be merged with similar bugs so long as the actual problems are acknowledged.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 796761 ***
