Corrupted Story / Bad passage name?

PatientRock

Started messing around with Twine 2.0 (Harlowe) for a project and somehow did something that made the entire story blow up. Created a new passage named "Day 1.5", tested the link from "Day 1" and things went nutty. Attached a screenshot. Everything has been replaced with endless passage links and anytime I open a passage Twine locks. Hours of work lost.

So, is there any hope of recovery? Or I guess most importantly, any idea as to what happened so I don't do it again? The "period" in the passage name?

greyelf

So, is there any hope of recovery?

Use the Archive option on the Stories screen to create an Archive HTML file containing the contents of all your Story Project.
You (or someone else) can then edit the contents of the Archive file (using a Text Editor), search for the Day1 passage and either delete it's contents or delete the passage. You can then use the Import From File option to import the edited Archive file into Twine.

notes:
a. I would make backup copy of the Archive file before editing it, in case a mistake is made during editing the file.

b. To find the passage you need to delete within the file you need to search for name="Day1"

c. The contents of each Passage within an Archive file is contained between an open and close tw-passagedata tag.

did something that made the entire story blow up

I am having problems reproducing your issue, could you describe in more detail the exactly steps you did to cause the problem.
eg.
1. You say you "Created a new passage", how exactly did you do that. Did you add a Day 1.5 link to the Day1 passage and use the auto-create missing passage feature, or did you use the Passage+ button.

2. You say "tested the link":
a. What did the original link to Day 1.5 in the Day1 passage look like?
b. Did it exists before you created the Day 1.5 passage, or did you add it to the Day1 passage after creating the Day 1.5 passage?
c. Did you use the auto-suggested passage name feature when you created the link?
d. What do you mean by "tested the link"

Once we have a more detailed description of the steps you used to create the problem I would then suggest creating a new issue on the Twine 2 project website.

TheMadExile

Knowing the full version of Twine 2 you're using would also be helpful (e.g. 2.0.10).

PatientRock

I did it again. (I'm talented that way). Twine 2.0.10, this time with Sugarcube 1.0.32 (which leads me to believe that it's a Twine 2 thing). I've attached a screenshot of the damage. Editing the archive unfortunately doesn't fix it since it replaced every bit of text in every passage. This sucks-- lost all my work.

Since that's twice now I'm trying to retrace my steps with a test project to duplicate the error. It has something to do with renaming a passage that has already been linked.

greyelf

I strongly suggest that you don't use punctuation (full stop, comma, dash, brackets, quotes, etc...) in your Passage names.
Punctuation commonly has extra meaning in programming languages and that may be what is causing the errors to you are seeing.

TheMadExile

I strongly suspect that (i.e. metacharacters in the old and/or new link string) is what's going on here. AFAIK, Twine 2 doesn't escape metacharacters in certain operations where it probably should. For example, when doing link replacements.

I've gone ahead and created an issue for this on the tracker.

PatientRock

Been unable to purposely recreate it but I'll keep trying. I think you're both right that it's punctuation. I didn't purposely use punctuation this time in passage names but somehow a pipe "|" got into the viral passage name when I mistyped a passage link. When I went to fix the resulting new, weirdly-named new passage is when the whole thing went wrong.