Corruption of Inserted Date

[hen3ry]

DW18.2 on MacOS 10.13.6

I have used DW’s standard date insertion thingie for many years.  It’s  currently done by Insert—>HTML—>Date.  I check the “Update automatically on save” option in the dialog.  That puts something like

   <!-- #BeginDate format:En2 -->22-Jun-2018<!-- #EndDate -->

in the markup. I position the date near the end of my pages, not that the position should matter.   This generally works exactly as I expect: the last-modified date of the page is shown below my content and automatically updated following subsequent edits.

Trouble is, this often gets corrupted.  Typically the trailing “—>” is duplicated so an arrow becomes visible to the right of the date in Design View and, ultimately, in the visitor’s browser.  In a short time, this one arrow typically grows to multiple arrows.

I can fix this easily enough when it happens, but … this should not happen, agreed?

I can’t spot any pattern to the corruption, either in terms of how I’m editing the page, or over the passage days/months/years of using this insertion or editing files that already contain it.   This issue has been occurring over many past versions of DW.

Maybe someone has dealt with this?  What’s the trick to avoiding the corruption?

TIA

[BenPleysier]

I have tried to replicate the problem without success. Even if I could reproduce it, it would only fall on deaf ears because we as co-users of Dreamweaver cannot do much about it.

It may be best if you report the problem stating the actions leading up to the problem. Click on help ->

[hen3ry]

Has anyone experienced this issue?  Have you noticed any patterns that suggest a cause?  If so, our combined experience could be a basis for a useful bug report.

This may take a while if few people use this insert date feature.  (Is that the case?)  If the issue doesn’t occur for others, that’s useful evidence:  I can suspect some unique issue in my installation, which I can explore on my own. 

Hmmm, thinking out loud: In the meantime, maybe I _can_ fix or mitigate  by adding JS scripts, so-called —unfortunately ambiguously— DW Extensions. 

Fix: I can substitute my own extra-careful implementation that updates the key string with the current date without corruption. I haven’t checked to see if the Insert Date implementing code is accessible for substitution. 

Mitigation:  check for this corruption, say, just before uploading and do a simple string replace to remove it.  Or, there may be other/better times to do this.

I’d call these “sleazy” (VERY inelegant)  measures, but if they remove this obstacle to my main objective — adding content —  well, OK.

[Nancy OShea]

I use PHP date and time stamps without any problems.

First, Validate the  code on each of your problem pages and fix all reported errors.    My guess is that DW is trying to reconcile something.  A cause and effect thing rather than an actual bug.

[hen3ry]

Good point.

I've seen this issue for a long time and I also wondered if my less-than-prefect legacy markup and practices going back 10+ years could be the cause.

The DW validator shifted in the recent past to HTML5 standard, and I've adapted during that time by learning and using HTML5.  Very frequently: I invoke the validator, step through the problems reported, make corrections, and re-validate until I see "0 Errors, 0 Warnings, 0 HIdden".   I can’t claim that my markup is 100% perfect from "new-file" to "done", but it is pretty good —the validator rarely flags more than a few simple issues, easily corrected— and the date corruption  continues at about the same rate.

This _just_ occurred to me:  Could the corruption issue be linked to the fact that my primarily English-language pages often contain non-English, sometimes right-to-left text?  I'm using Unicode UTF-8.   Hmmmm.....