* Trailer record error message

[delwoodman]

trailer error.JPG (17.59 KiB) Viewed 4914 times

I regularly send small gedcom updates to my brother by email attachment. By small I mean no more that 25 or so individuals. This has worked perfectly well for several years. A day or so ago, I sent a batch of updates. On opening the exported gedcom files he got the message above.

We both use v5.0.11. We spent a lot of toing-and-froing trying to rule out different causes but ultimately the solution was to share by way of onedrive or dropbox, both of which worked just fine. I am therefore posting so that anyone searching in the future for a way of dealing with this particular problem may perhaps save themselves some time looking for other causes.

I note that coincidentally there has been a recent post on the mailing list about this error message so will post there as well.

[tatewise]

I have moved this to General Usage because it is not associated with other genealogy programs.

What method did you use to create the GEDCOM?

Have you still got the incomplete GEDCOM?

Did you actually look at its contents to determine where it was truncated?
Was it truncated before it was sent or only after it arrived at your brother?

It would be useful to see its contents, and since it is only about 25 Individuals it could be attached to this thread.

It seems unlikely that E-mail system is truncating the file to lose the trailer.

The problem on the mailing list was with a much bigger GEDCOM and was dramatically truncated immediately after being exported.

[delwoodman]

Mike

Thanks for your comments. To clarify, the problem was first spotted in an assortment of about 10 gedcoms which were sent to my brother over the course of a few days, all of which encountered the trailer error when he opened them. These were all between 20 and 30 individuals. To try and narrow down to what was causing the problem I produced a series of gedcoms which were subsets of various of my projects. Most were subsets of my main project which I work on frequently but some were exported from projects which hadn't been opened for 2 years or more.

I normally do my FH work on my desktop running under Windows 7 64 bit and the original batch of gedcoms was produced in this way. However, to rule out the possibility that other software recently installed on my laptop might be having an effect, all the test gedcoms were produced on my laptop running FH 5.0.11 under Vista.

We attempted to rule out as many variables as we could by using different machines either end and also testing with another family member who uses FH case my brother's FH install on both of his machines had become corrupt since last exchanging gedcoms earlier in the year. In all of these tests we kept encountering the same trailer error at my brother's end except for two cases. One was a small subset of data (4 individuals). The other was an export from the v5 Sample Project, reset to installation conditions. In the light of what we now know, I guess these just happened fortuitously to fall below whatever file size triggers the problem at the stage of email transmission.

I use virgin media mail (which I think is effectively a branded version of gmail) to send emails. My brother uses btinternet.com. We concluded that the problem was probably at my brother's end since he found that some gedcoms I had sent him last year which he had installed and merged without problem now gave an error message when retrieved from BT/Yahoo; but some gedcoms we had exchanged via dropbox were still error free.

We shall be using dropbox or onedrive to exchange gedcoms in future and the principal reason for my post was as a cautionary tale.

old-coates is as it left my machine. returned-coates is after being opened by my brother and saved on his machine then returned via dropbox to safeguard against further interference by either of our email systems. As you can see, somewhere along the way the lines have been concatenated and it is this that is causing the error.

With hindsight I should clearly have asked my brother to inspect the gedcoms his end.

Anyway, problem solved and solution found.

Derek

[delwoodman]

Mike:

A quick follow up to my previous post. As I mentioned, the returned-coates file had been opened on my brother's machines (either a desktop running Windows 8.1 or a laptop running Vista - same behaviour on both; FH 5.0.11 on desktop, not sure without checking with him what version is on the Vista machine) then saved and sent back to me via our shared dropbox folder. (Gedcoms sent to him via our shared dropbox folder are fine).

A file he sent straight back by email without opening is not concatenated and opens fine my end.

Derek

[tatewise]

Having analysed those attached GEDCOM files I have an explanation and solution.

The faulty files have not been truncated nor lost their trailer record.

What has happened is the Newline character at the end of each line has been modified in the download. I have not yet double-checked, but it has probably become a Carriage Return, which is often not recognised in the same way. I have had this happen with all sorts of text downloads.

If you open such files using Start > All Programs > Accessories > Notepad you will see all the lines strung together as if one long line.

The solution is to open the file using Start > All Programs > Accessories > WordPad and simply Save it. That reinstates the Newline characters, and everything is fine.

Another solution that is almost certain to work is to send the GEDCOM in compressed ZIP format, and extract it at the other end.

[delwoodman]

Mike:

Many thanks for this.

As I say, we shall circumvent this in future by using Dropbox or OneDrive to transmit gedcoms but your comments will prove useful in dealing with any other gedcoms which we wish to retrieve from the BT/Yahoo server.

Derek