Help with Error: POSIX collating elements are not supported

[Doug Heavrin-Brown]

Hello everyone. Thank you for your responses.

I actually was able to fix the problem we had by deleting lines 952-955 from 
the Markdown script. That fixed the unordered lists on the website, and 
stopped the error messages on the server. (We first tried replacing our 2004 
version with a 2009 version, but that didn't work. So we did start with an 
unmodified version of the markdown.php file.)

Lines 952-955 were part of the "Re-usable pattern to match any entire ul or 
ol list" (the $whole_list_re variable) and contained:

(?!    # Negative lookahead for another list item marker
    [ ]*
    '.$marker_re.'[ ]+
)

I had tried simply commenting out those lines, but that didn't work. I had 
to remove them completely. I think that might affect any nested lists, but I 
don't think we have any on this site, so we're fine with that.

I'll try escaping the dot characters in the original script when I have more 
time.

Thank you again,

Doug

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michel Fortin" <michel.fortin at michelf.com>
To: "Doug Heavrin-Brown" <doughb at umich.edu>; "Discussion related to 
Markdown." <markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net>
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2011 7:04 PM
Subject: Re: Help with Error: POSIX collating elements are not supported



> Le 2011-12-09 à 16:27, Doug Heavrin-Brown a écrit :

>

>> Hello,

>>

>> I hope this is the right place to get help fixing an error when using 

>> Markdown on our servers.

>>

>> I'm not sure what our webmasters have done, but a recent change (perhaps 

>> to PHP?) made our Markdown text  disappear from the page because of an 

>> error.

>>

>> PHP Warning:  preg_replace_callback() [<a 

>> href='function.preg-replace-callback'>function.preg-replace-callback</a>]: 

>> Compilation failed: POSIX collating elements are not supported at offset 

>> 116 in /[PATH]/markdown.php on line 974

>>

>> Searching for help turned out to be mostly fruitless, except for a page 

>> pointing to rows 977-981, where one poster says commenting out those 

>> lines stops the error.

>>

>> http://forum.theturninggate.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1738

>>

>> That is correct, but it also stops unordered lists from being formatted. 

>> While we can live with that for now (because Markdown has worked so well 

>> so far) that won't do in the long run.

>>

>> There were other pages that mention PRCE, but that seemed to be with a 

>> different version of PHP (our servers are running 5.2.9 -- and we are not 

>> able to change that).

>>

>> We have not found anyone who has the proper skills and is also able to 

>> help us with this problem.

>>

>> Has anyone encountered this before and is there a way to fix it?

>

>

> I guess it's my fault for not updating PHP Markdown fast enough. Sorry. 

> :-)

>

> I've been made aware of it in September, but I haven't checked it yet. It 

> might be that a PHP update is causing it, although it seems I would be 

> getting more emails if that was the case. Perhaps not that many people 

> have warnings enabled, or perhaps they just silently fill up everyone's 

> server logs and nobody look at those logs and so nobody tells me.

>

> The warning message could be clearer, but I suspect PCRE is treating 

> specially character classes in regular expressions that starts with a dot, 

> warning that POSIX character classes (which starts with a dot) are not 

> implemented. The solution should be to replace any instance of "[." in any 

> regular expressions with "[\.".

>

> -- 

> Michel Fortin

> michel.fortin at michelf.com

> http://michelf.com/

>

>

>

>

>