Unable to open GP5 files with UTF8 BOM
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#40 Unable to open GP5 files with UTF8 BOM
Hi,
I have converted a GPX file to GP5 using WebTabPlayer (http://www.webtabplayer.com). The resulting file is here: http://www.webtabplayer.com/Download/146343/gp5 . It seems that the file has UTF-8 BOM (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7297888/ufeff-character-showing-up-in-files-how-to-remove-them), i.e. starts with <U+FEFF>. Incidentally, TuxGuitar does not manage to open the file. I used the bomstrip utility (http://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/projects/bomstrip/) to remove the BOM, which allowed TuxGuitar to open the file.
I have never had the issue before and I don't know if it is a bug from WebTabPlayer. Maybe it would be desirable to have Tuxguitar handle GP5 file with BOM?
Cheers,
Florent
It is not a correct gp5 file.
Guitar Pro 5 can not open this file (Error-message)
I reported this problem to WebTabPlayer support multiple times and they never responded. It doesn't look like they're interested in fixing this. A program I develop that imports Guitar Pro files strips out the BOM, but I've run into multiple cases where simply removing the BOM doesn't allow it to open in Guitar Pro, so there are probably other encoding defects introduced by WebTabPlayer.
I guess this bug report is invalid, then. Unfortunately, I cannot close it myself.
I have also had no reply from WebTabPlayer. I think there is support for GPX in the development version of TuxGuitar. If a new version were released, I would happily forget about WebTabPlayer.
I still think it would be a good idea for TuxGuitar to work around this by ignoring the BOM if it is present. It's an easy thing to implement and after the BOM is removed, the file usually opens just fine in TuxGuitar, allowing it to be re-saved to a valid GP file. But once a stable binary release of TuxGuitar offers GPX import, I will no longer suggest WebTabPlayer to people.
WebTabPlayer has fixed their converter. At least on one GPX file I had it converted to a valid GP5 file that Guitar Pro was able to open.