Bugzilla Bug 175516

Within some of my Contacts of Evolution, newline characters are displayed
randomly and are persistent after deletion, they reappear randomly.



Reproducible: Always




This is a known bug with Evolution contacts and has not been fixed even as of:
gnome-extra/evolution-data-server-1.10.1

Here's is my official and continuing bug report with Gnome Evolution:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=416664

A proposed patch was issued for this bugzilla report but on another bug file
here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356176

To date from what i just heard on my bug report, it has yet to be officially
applied, but a Debian developer has applied the patch locally to the debian
tree for Evolution.

Thank you for report, roger. The bug was fixed upstream. I've backported patch
and applied to evolution-data-server-1.10.2-r1. Fixed.

Great!  I would have done more, but time only permits me todo so much
programming ;-)

(Would be great if Gentoo had a 24/7 voting system for volunteers/developers
for Gentoo.  You have my vote for posting this long overdue puppy. ;-)

Ok.  For historical documentation of this bug... I fixed a few more of my
contacts acquiring the nagging "\n" character sets within my contacts.

You might also want to note I found these character sets, not only within the
"Comment" field, but in also fields of the vcard format.

To fix:

1) Export the contact(s) to vcard file.  (Right click and choose Export.)

2) Open the VCard with GVim and choose "Edit > Find/Replace".

3a) Replace all occurrences of "\n" with spaces:  Specify for Find "\\n" and
Replace "   " (five spaces or just one or two spaces designating places you've
had a carriage return).

3b) This time, just find & replace back slashes: Find "\\" and Replace "    "
(five spaces or just one or two spaces).

4) Save the file and import the vcard back using Evolution > File > Import.

I still notice Evolution spawning the following warnings, but can find no back
slashes or "\n" character sets anymore:

(evolution-2.12:12606): libebook-WARNING **: invalid escape, passing it through
(evolution-2.12:12606): libebook-WARNING **: invalid escape, passing it through

But so far, I am "\n" free.  I'm hoping time will tell what invalid escape
characters are embedded and which contacts they're in.  I think these "invalid
escapes are causing a slight delay displaying the contacts.