Unsupported character reading profile

[simbun]

Hi @simoncn,

I was modifying my config to see if I could make use of the ITUNESADVISORY tag, and as a quick test added ? into tagFormat to see if it would display correctly in control points, but after a restart MinimServer failed with '<servername>: Unsupported character reading profile <profilename>'.
Not a problem I thought - as I intended to perform the translation in tagUpdate.txt anyway - but the only way I found to correct the profile was at the OS level, as no matter what I did I couldn't correct it through MinimWatch or the web configuration.

I think we've discussed this type of deadlock before but I thought I'd mention it just in case there's a way for you to avoid it.

Thanks

MinimWatch was running on Windows with MinimServer on Linux.

[simoncn]

This message is produced if the profile file contains a character encoding that isn't valid for UTF-8 or the platform character set if different. With your setup (MinimServer running on Linux), this would be an invalid UTF-8 character.

What exactly did you do that caused this to happen? Your post mentions adding ? to tagFormat. What was the precise value that you used for tagFormat? Did you set this value using MinimWatch or using the MinimServer confguration page?

[simbun]

Sorry I didn't realise that it wasn't accepted by the forum software; it was "Negative Squared Latin Capital Letter E" to represent Explicit content.

The change I made through MinimWatch was:

Code:

tagFormat: Title.displayFormat={$title^$subtitle^? (^)^$trackType^ [^ Track]^}

Replace ? with Negative E

[simoncn]

The problem is caused by MinimWatch running on Windows, not by MinimServer running on Linux. If you use the MinimServer configuration web page to enter this character, the profile file is written correctly and MinimServer can be restarted without error.

The character you are using is represented in Java as a "surrogate pair" of 16-bit Unicode characters. For some reason this isn't working on Windows. I will investigate and post back here when I have more information.

[simbun]

(31-08-2025 22:10)simoncn Wrote:  If you use the MinimServer configuration web page to enter this character, the profile file is written correctly and MinimServer can be restarted without error.

I hadn't considered that, although it would mean I'd be unable to use MinimWatch for future amendments. However, for one-time tests that's useful to know.

When I created the post, I was envisioning some kind of rollback to a known good profile (one that has had a successful restart/rescan), but it's likely complete overkill.

Thanks again

[simoncn]

The right way to fix this is to prevent the invalid character error from occurring. This error is caused by a bug in ohNet and I am working on a fix.

[simoncn]

This problem is now fixed in MinimWatch update 119. No changes to MinimServer were needed.