Table data and names disappearing. Any ideas?

fogarty

I have a word game that has sentences in about 30 tables. The game is live and has been working well for at least 6 months.

I'm making a holiday version of the game, and swapping in new "festive" sentences, but the sentences keep disappearing from 6 of my tables. The table names become blank too. When I open the now-nameless tables, they're 1 row, 1 column, and blank.

I'm doing all the tables the same way: importing CSV files that I made from Numbers on a Mac. Everything seems fine when I import them, but later, those 6 tables are gone. (It's happened twice now, and it's the same 6 tables that disappear.)

Is this a known bug? I can't imagine why this would happen, let alone why it would only happen to certain tables.

mounted88

Just a guess...are you importing corrupted .csv files? Other then that I really don't have a clue

fogarty

The CSV files seem fine. They opened OK. But I made new CSV files, made new tables in my game, uploaded the new CSV and recoded the sections that references the tables.

Although the all table data *appears* to be there, when I use a "tableRowCount" reporter, it says the table only has one row. Then, when I save and close the game file and reopen it, the table is blank again.

I'm going to submit a bug report, but I'd definitely appreciate any advice anyone can provide. Since this is a "holiday" app, and Apple is extra busy this time of year, I don't have a lot of time to get it submitted before it becomes moot.

tatiang

Agree that you might have a corrupt CSV or more likely a corrupt cell entry (e.g a strange character or non-printing character). Try copying and pasting the content into a new spreadsheet and saving it and importing it. I would recommend Windows CSV format if Numbers supports that (Excel does). If it still doesn't work, you may need to do some debugging: start with a single row, say, and see if you can import that. If so, try two rows, etc. until you find the problematic row.

fogarty

Thanks, @tatiang.

I've scanned the spreadsheets for words with strange characters and I don't see any. When I've had trouble with that in the past, only the cell with the strange character comes up blank. (The cell with soufflé ended up blank, for example. No soufflé for you!)

I will try copying and pasting to make a new spreadsheet/CSV file, and then the row-by-row debugging. I hadn't thought of that, and it seems like a good next step.

tatiang

Good luck. Those kinds of problems are a pain to troubleshoot.

Lol @ "No soufflé for you!"

fogarty

I'm updating this in case people are searching for help in the future:

The problem was an accented e, an apostrophe, and some quotation marks in my spreadsheets.

I don't know why the punctuation and special character cause the whole table to fail this time instead of just the single cell like it has in the past for me, but it did.

As always, thanks for the help!

tatiang

Thanks for letting us know. Glad you found the problem.

McSparkles

I had the same problem with a test game I was messing about with to test out some new features. I got distracted though & never got back to it to investigate further. Thanks for the solution update.