Longer clues not clearing

[mizlan]

When a relatively long clue is displayed and followed up by a shorter one, the characters at the end are not cleared.

early clue

moving on to a later clue

I think this can be resolved by setting all earlier characters there to spaces, overwriting whatever was there previously.

[jpnance]

Thanks for the report! I've seen this issue before but not in a very long time, which makes me wonder if you're using an old version of xw. Unfortunately, I don't have anything like xw --version built in but just running npm install -g jpnance/xw should (I think) upgrade you to the latest version. If you tell me which puzzle you were working on when you encountered this issue, I can verify that it's fixed.

[mizlan]

I believe I am using an updated version (I looked at the latest git commit and it checks out with the contents of the npm package I installed) (I only installed it yesterday). I can confirm I am experiencing the error on today's Newsday puzzle. Interestingly enough, this doesn't happen when I open an already-solved puzzle and navigate through the clues.

…

On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 7:18 AM Patrick Nance ***@***.***> wrote: Thanks for the report! I've seen this issue before but not in a very long time, which makes me wonder if you're using an old version of xw. Unfortunately, I don't have anything like xw --version built in but just running npm install -g jpnance/xw should (I think) upgrade you to the latest version. If you tell me which puzzle you were working on when you encountered this issue, I can verify that it's fixed. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#3 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AKSBU2NNUOYIEBAFILNDNQTU5YYK7ANCNFSM5PSWVOHQ> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[jpnance]

Huh, very interesting! It looks like Newsday have done a better job locking down their crosswords since I last updated the xw scraper. I assume you grabbed today's puzzle using a different scraper? If so, could you either attach it here or point me to a different puzzle that exhibits the bug?

While we're at it, which terminal emulator are you using? I've only really used xw in urxvt, xterm, and iTerm2, so it's very possible that a different terminal acts worse.

[mizlan]

I think I've narrowed it down: this happens when I use xw on a local .puz file, but when I run xw lat, which presumably grabs the puz file through a different pipeline, it doesn't occur.

Maybe this will help: I use https://github.com/thisisparker/xword-dl to download puzzles (xword-dl nd downloads today's Newsday puzzle) and the bug occurs on both the Newsday and LA Times crosswords I tested.

[jpnance]

Thanks. I am now able to reproduce the bug using both a Newsday puzzle and an LA Times puzzle, though I'll have to look deeper into what's going on. xw works just fine with the various AVCX and Inkubator PUZ files I feed it so I suspect it's some sort of inconsistency with how xword-dl is implementing the PUZ format. In any case, I have something to go on now.

[jpnance]

As an update, some investigation revealed that the html2text utility (used by xword-dl) was unexpectedly emitting a newline character and that was compounded by xw never expecting to see a newline character in a clue. Parker has since updated xword-dl to account for this, so updating to the latest version should effectively solve this problem. It has, however, made me think that stripping out newline characters from clues is probably a good default behavior for xw to have, so I'll leave this issue open until I make that change.