Invalid character on Line 1, position 1

Question

Yesterday, while opening Paratext 9.1, a user got the following popup warning message:

Le projet Ban sur votre ordinateur n’a pas pu être ouvert.
‘.’, valeur hexadécimale 0x00, est un charactère non valide. Ligne 1, position 1

Translation:

The project Ban could not be opened.
‘.’, hexidecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. Line 1, position 1

After clicking “OK”, the only option, Paratext opened but the project “Ban” didn’t, just as the popup warned. I “fixed” the problem by closing Paratext, renaming the project folder, then using Send/Receive to receive the entire project all over again. Now Paratext opens the project fine, but the warning message persists every time Paratext opens. How can I get rid of it?

Answer 1

You can get rid of the problem by deleting the folder that you renamed, or moving it from the “My Paratext 9 Projects” folder so Paratext does not see it. Any folder inside the Paratext projects folder is viewed as a potential project. If you fixed the file that has the bad character, you would be getting an error that two projects on your computer have the same digital ID and one cannot be opened. Paratext identifies projects by the short name and by a digital ID, a long number that is stored in the project settings.

Comments

This would be a lot simpler fix than I imagined. I’ll try it tomorrow. Thanks.

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yes, this solved the problem. For future reference, the corrupted project had several corrupted SFM files. They were filled with null characters (x00). This might be due to frequent cold power-offs of the user’s computer, which seems not to have a working battery at the moment.