obsidian-tasks: Stuck Task Loading... in the presence of specific markdown file, only on mobile

Please check that this issue hasn’t been reported before.

I searched previous Bug Reports didn’t find any similar reports.

Expected Behavior

```tasks
not done
```

should produce a list of tasks not done on the iOS and iPad clients, just like it does on the Windows, Linux and MacOs clients

Current behaviour

Tasks Loading… appears and doesn’t go away.

Steps to reproduce

This bug is specific to one specific vault of mine. I couldn’t reproduce it on other vaults. I could on copies of this vault.

Which Operating Systems are you using?

Android
iPhone/iPad
Linux
macOS
Windows

Obsidian Version

1.4.6

Tasks Plugin Version

3.10.0

Checks

I have tried it with all other plugins disabled and the error still occurs

Possible solution

The bug seems to occur when a large PowerPoint file exists in a folder. When the file is removed everything works fine. Sorry, I can’t attach the file as it contains confidential material.

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created a year ago
Comments: 39

Most upvoted comments

Yes, I deleted this file, and I’m okay without it.

It’s not a problem for me anymore - but it makes for a not-so-great Obsidian onboarding experience, especially for people who’d like to migrate from Evernote and other software and, instead of bisecting their files and spending some time on it, would decide to give up… I don’t expect any plugin to work with malformed data, but some logs/error messages/help to debug it would be very welcome (and probably not just for this specific issue, but more broadly).

bartwronski on Aug 6, 2023

Good news! It wasn’t the PowerPoint file as I suspected. The problem is with the file 6 29th March 2023.md. I suspect it’s the non printing characters you’ll see in the attached zip.

I’ve recently moved a lot of files from Evernote to Obsidian, mainly using Yarle, and I’ve cleaned them up with some elisp on emacs. There are a few strange characters knocking about still.

Anyway, the zip file has a minimal vault with only Task enabled. It works fine on the desktop, it can’t be viewed on my iPhone.

taskbug.zip

I got the test vault to my iPad via Obsidian Sync, and could then see the problem (stuck Loading Tasks…)
On Mac I then edited the characters in question out of the Mar 29 file
And the search worked on iPad
I then did Undo on Mac to bring the characters
And from that point on, I was unable to get the search to fail on iPad

I’ve spent more than an hour on this (as figuring out getting the vault open on iPad took a while) and made no progress. I will pick it up again when I have more time.

claremacrae on Jun 17, 2023