Author: olivier.cailloux

Description:
I somehow introduced, when editing (using MS Wordpad or Notepad) or uploading (through ftp) my LocalSettings.php file, strange characters in the beginning of the file. Invisible in the editor (because not displayable), these characters (0xEF BB BF) caused the wiki to not function properly.

MediaWiki would be easier to use if it would display a proper error message (something like: 'illegal character in the LocalSettings.php file'). Instead of which, my MediaWiki software was displaying an empty page instead of the "welcome" page, was talking about some problem with cookies after an editing, ... The strangest thing is that some functionnalities and some pages where working correctly, and others not. It took me a while to discover the source of the problem.

That mediawiki software was pretty old, but I checked by uploading the problematic LocalSettings.php file to a newer MediaWiki installation and the behavior is strange also (there it says something like it cannot add the required header settings).

I think that this is a bug because, as far as I understand the concept of a php-file, the beginning of the file (which was before the <?php entry) should act as if it was normal HTML. Then some strange hex characters should not break the entire application, but should rather (at worst) cause some strange characters to be displayed in some pages. If the LocalSettings.php file is supposed to begin with <?php, then it is easy to check that before parsing the rest of the file and display a proper error message... It would save time for administrators.

I'm sorry, I don't know how to check the version number, but the second version is recent (stable version from about one month ago).

Thank you.

Version: unspecified
Severity: minor