When I imported from phpBB, some quotes were not being handled correctly, as discussed here. How can I fix them after the fact? They currently look like this: [quote]some text [/quote] and like this: [quote=“John Doe”]some text John[/quote] The quote tags need to be on a new line. I looked at this, but couldn’t figure out if it could be applied: [image] Replace a string in all posts Self-Hosting bookmark This guide explains how to replace a string in all posts within a Discourse instance. person_raising_hand Required user level: System Administrator warning Console Access Required Want to replace a string in all the posts on a site? Let’s get started! warning WARNING: We strongly recommend you take a full backup before proceeding, and make sure your string replacement is specific enough to affect only the places you want it to. If this string replacement goes wrong, every…

I’m certainly glad I tested this. From how I understood the documentation newlines needed to be double escaped. Not so. They needed to be only single escapes else they were written as literal text. I am fairly certain there are better ways to know the number of affected rows, but I do not know how to do them. Anyway, it looks good to me. a couple before and afters: [newline1][newline2][newline3][newline4] To recap caveats for those that might be interested in this query It does not match against the lack of newlines around improperly formatted bbcode tags in raw post content It relies on Discourse displaying the bbcode tags in the cooked content to identify problem posts it does not take into account any posts where displaying of bbcode tags in the cooked content is desired (eg. in code fences) it matches per post, not per bbcode tag. Therefore if a post contains both improper and proper syntax bbcode tags, all will be surrounded by newlines it does not create edit revision histories posts require a rebake for the changes to be effected in cooked it can not be stressed strongly enough, Save a backup before running this query the RETURNING raw line will show the number of affected rows after outputting all of the raw content. Though acceptable with my small sample set, this may be undesireable for larger UPDATEs WITH posts_with_bbcode_quotes AS (SELECT posts.id AS targeted_posts FROM posts WHERE posts.cooked ~* '\[quote[^]]*]' ORDER BY posts.id) UPDATE posts SET raw = regexp_replace(posts.raw, '\[(/)?quote([^]]*)]', E'\n[\\1quote\\2]\n', 'g') FROM posts_with_bbcode_quotes WHERE posts.id IN (posts_with_bbcode_quotes.targeted_posts) RETURNING raw;

Great! Now comes the decision making as to what you want to happen. eg. [quote]foobar[/quote] to foobar [quote some_attr="some_val"]foobar[/quote] to foobar [quote]foobar[/quote] to foobar [quote some_attr="some_val"]foobar[/quote] to foobar AFAIK the blockquote tags in Discourse do not have attributes and trying to keep them would likely be a poor idea. Would one of the first three be OK even with losing any attributes there might be?

I’d be perfectly happy with inserting a line break before and after [quote%] and a line break before and after [/quote]. Losing the attribute would be ok.

Well, except that once the bbcode tags are replaced there won’t be a before and after, that will make the query easier. So like this would be OK, are you sure? [quote]foobar[/quote] to foobar [quote some_attr="some_val"]foobar[/quote] to foobar

No. Is it necessary to remove the bbcode tags? In the posts where I manually just add a return to ensure the tags are on a line by themselves works as a fix. [quote] some text [/quote] produces [quote]foobar[/quote] to foobar would lose the blockquote. But, [quote]foobar[/quote] to foobar would be OK even if the attribute is lost.

Now I’m a bit confused. Please correct me if I’m off base on any of this. posts from phpBB were imported to Discourse and became raw post content all of the bbcode tags are well-formed (paired and nested correctly) because the phpBB bbcode tags were not in proper Markdown syntax (inline instead of block level), they were not changed to Discourse blockquote tags and the cooked post content displays them as bbcode tags you don’t want to remove the bbcode tags from the cooked post content, you want to reformat the raw content to conform to Markdown syntax you want to keep the text content that is between the start and end bbcode tag pairs if necessary you are willing to do a rebake or you want to replace the bbcode tags in the cooked post content with blockquote tags you want to keep the text content that is between the start and end bbcode tag pairs if necessary you are willing to repeat the process if the raw post content reappears for some reason

You are not wrong @Mittineague. Both 1-6 scenarios would fix the current state of quotes.

I agree with @pfaffman that ideally this problem would be handled by the import script. If I’m correct, changing the cooked content runs the risk of the raw content replacing the cooked content at some point (eg. global rebake) which could be annoying. Changing the raw content might not update the cooked content and require running a global rebake. I know that raw content can be accessed using URLs like domain/raw/topic_id but I do not know if the json / rss URLs use raw or cooked content let alone what plugins might be using. In any case, short of fixing the import script and running it again I’m leaning towards changing the raw content as a better approach even if it means rebaking needs to be run. The first thing I would do is run this query in Data Explorer and manually edit the 4 non-all-lowercase bbcode tags and make them lowercase and block level instead of inline, only to get them out of the way. SELECT id AS post_id FROM posts WHERE cooked LIKE '%[QUOTE%' OR cooked LIKE '%[Quote%' AFAIK, clicking on the Data Explorer id result should bring you to that post. EDIT I just tested and I needed to SELECT topic_id to get a link to the topics and alias as post_id to get the excerpts SELECT topic_id , id AS post_id FROM posts WHERE cooked ~* '\[quote[^\]]*\]' [bbcode-quotes]

Thanks @Mittineague. The counts now match after finding and manually fixing the 4 non-all-lowercase bbcode tags. I’ve already moved, merged, and cleaned all sorts of stuff that was left over from the old phpBB forum, so re-importing is no longer practical. I am absolutely OK with that approach. :ok_hand:

I created a topic in my localhost to test against. I hit a bit of a snag that might be a concern if you have posts where you want the bbcode quote tags to show inside of code fences unchanged. Specifically, I had been working up some badge queries for “writer/essayist/novelist”, the idea being to grant them to members that made longer posts. The alpha queries were matching posts that had very little original text but with large amounts of quoted text. I didn’t want that so I put a test for [quote in the query. The query was put inside code fencing in workup topics. Because I use triple backticks out of habit I could use this in a WHERE to filter out those posts. But if any had been inside single backticks or in indented code it would have be more complex. IMHO adding newlines before and after the tags wouldn’t render the display indecipherable but the change is something you should be aware of. eg. This won’t [quote]work[/quote] would be changed to This won’t [quote] work [/quote] Does your forum have posts that might include similar code examples?

Fix quotes after phpBB import

Product Support

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) January 27, 2018, 2:05pm 23

The best solution is to fix the importer and import again. I’m guessing that this solution doesn’t help you, but for others finding this thread, make sure that your import is what you want before going live.

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Fix quotes after phpBB import

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