Alright, let me tell you about this mess I had the other day. We’ve got this old piece of software, let’s just call it ‘Kolek’. It’s ancient, quirky, but it does one specific job we still need. Usually, it just chugs along.
So, I came in, grabbed my coffee, and sat down to feed Kolek its morning data file. Same routine as always. I pointed Kolek to the file, hit the ‘go’ button, and bam! Instead of the usual processing noises, I got this weird, barely helpful error pop-up. Basically said something like ‘kolek cant read the file’. Yeah, spelled just like that, ‘kolek cant read’. Great start to the day.
First thought, maybe the file got corrupted during transfer. Happens sometimes. I downloaded it again. Tried it. Nope, same error. Okay, maybe Kolek just needs a kick? Restarted the Kolek software. Still no good. Rebooted the whole damn server it runs on. Wasted a good 15 minutes waiting for that. Tried again. Still ‘kolek cant read’.
Digging Deeper
Now I started getting a bit annoyed. It wasn’t the file, probably. It wasn’t the server needing a reboot. What else? I checked the file permissions. Looked fine. I could open the file myself in a basic text editor, looked like the usual data, rows and columns of stuff. Nothing obviously wrong.
I grabbed a file from last week, one I knew worked. Fed that to Kolek. Same error! Okay, now this is weird. This means something changed with Kolek or its environment, right? Or maybe… maybe the way I was looking at the files wasn’t enough.
These old systems can be super picky. I remembered Kolek sometimes freaked out about weird characters or file encodings. So, I opened the new ‘bad’ file in a more advanced editor, one that shows everything, even invisible characters.
And there it was. Staring me right in the face, but invisible in Notepad.
- At the very beginning of the file, there was this tiny invisible character sequence. A BOM, I think they call it? Kolek hates those.
- Also, the line endings were wrong. Looked like CRLF (Windows style), and Kolek always wanted just LF (Unix style).
The Fix and the Facepalm
Why now? Why did this suddenly start happening? Turns out, the process that generates these files got a tiny ‘update’ over the weekend. Someone changed a script. The new script saved the files slightly differently, adding the BOM and using Windows line endings. Nobody thought to test it with old Kolek.
So, the fix was actually simple once I knew the problem:
I just opened the file again in that fancy editor. Explicitly saved it using ‘UTF-8’ encoding (important: without the BOM option). Changed the line endings setting to ‘LF’. Saved it.
Fed this cleaned-up file to Kolek. And guess what? It worked perfectly. Gobbled it up like nothing ever happened. The relief was huge, let me tell you.
So yeah, ‘kolek cant read’ wasn’t really Kolek being broken, it was just Kolek being its usual extremely fussy self about invisible stuff that a tiny, untested change introduced. Spent half my morning on it. Just goes to show, with legacy systems, you always gotta check the basics, and sometimes the basics include invisible things you can’t see in Notepad. Always suspect the small changes first!
