[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Inada Naoki]

Inada Naoki  added the comment:

I know chm is handy. But Microsoft abandoned it already.
I think we should stop providing chm.

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[胡丹]

胡丹  added the comment:

I found another workaround to alleviate this problem.

My envrionments: Win 10 Pro 2004, Python 3.9.6, cp936 locale

When I open the Python CHM help file, e.g. double click, Win10 actually uses 
the command: 
"C:\Windows\hh.exe" D:/Python/Python39/Doc/python396.chm
But when I try "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\hh.exe" 
D:/Python/Python39/Doc/python396.chm 
Magic happens, crash problem just vanished :)

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Charles G.]

Charles G.  added the comment:

My previous Windows version (Win 10 1803) does not have this crashing problem. 
It only crashed after upgrading to 21H1. So I replaced hhctrl.ocx in system32 
(Win 10 21H1) with hhctrl.ocx from Windows.old.

2019/03/19  11:45   696.320 hhctrl.ocx
2021/09/23  03:29   729.600 hhctrl.ocx.old

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Stephen Paul Chappell]

Change by Stephen Paul Chappell :


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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Steve Dower]

Steve Dower  added the comment:

So I found the "owner" of the HTML Help component in Windows (I put owner in 
quotes because this tool is _very_ maintenance mode, so nothing short of a 
critical vulnerability is going to be touched) and he helped me do some 
debugging.

In short, the index file is either corrupt, or it is not parsed correctly. I 
can reliably reproduce the crash with the following steps:

1. Open the Python docs
2. Switch to the Index tab
3. Double-click on any second-level (indented) entry
4. Modify the text in the Index search box

We haven't yet gone deep enough to be able to tell whether the help compiler is 
at fault, or the loader.

If anyone has the time and inclination, testing with older versions (if you can 
find them) of the HTML Help compiler may find a version that works. 
Unfortunately, the older copies we used to use were on the Subversion server, 
which is long gone now.

Alternatively, if anyone knows of a similar tool that we can redistribute 
easily with CPython (i.e. it's not as big as Zeal) and is significantly better 
than just using the user's default browser, I'd be interested to hear about it 
(as would the rest of the developer world, I'm sure - this is a fairly popular 
format!).

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Christoph Zwerschke]

Christoph Zwerschke  added the comment:

Had the same problem for years and wondered why nobody else complained.

Still reproducable with Win 10 Pro 2004, Python 3.8, cp1252 locale.

Deleting hh.dat did not solve the problem for me.

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Ma Lin]

Ma Lin  added the comment:

> when I delete the file %APPDATA%\Microsoft\HTML Help\hh.dat,
> the problem seems to go away.

It doesn't work for me.
Moreover, `Binary Index=Yes` no longer works on my PC.

A few days ago, I installed a clean Windows 10 2004, then CHM's index cannot be 
used.

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Václav Dvořák]

Václav Dvořák  added the comment:

I have just apparently discovered a workaround! (Thanks to @chrullrich whose 
comment gave me the hint.) Maybe it's been obvious to everybody this whole time 
but I have only now found out that when I delete the file 
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\HTML Help\hh.dat (in my case 
c:\Users\dvorak\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\HTML Help\hh.dat), the problem seems 
to go away. I'm so happy I just had to share. :)

I also have another, possibly naive idea. While Microsoft has ignored this 
issue for years, they have recently "helped the community release their 
distribution of Python to the Microsoft Store" 
(https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/python-in-the-windows-10-may-2019-update/),
 and by "they", apparently I mean the very same Steve Dower who comments here, 
as I just realized. :-D (So... thanks, Steve.) So I'm thinking, as we actually 
have a Microsoft insider here, wouldn't it be possible to make Microsoft fix 
the viewer so that it, I don't know, possibly DOESN'T CRASH? I assume that 
Microsoft has plenty of those crash reports in some database?

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Ma Lin]

Ma Lin  added the comment:

> More realistically, including the docs as unbundled HTML files
> and relying on the default browser is probably an all-around better idea.

CHM's index function is very convenient, I almost always use this feature when 
I use CHM.

How about use tkinter to write a doc indexing tool, it reads the indexes in 
this page:
https://docs.python.org/3/genindex-all.html

Its behavior is the same as CHM's index, except that the link is opened in 
browser.

This indexing tool can be packaged with Python installer, just like IDLE, then 
MacOS/Linux users can also use the index.

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Steve Dower]

Steve Dower  added the comment:

We either need someone to contribute a fix to 
sphinxcontrib\htmlhelp\templates\project.hhp (bearing in mind that this *must* 
be optional, as it breaks search), or write code to patch the generated file 
between generation and use (which is probably hard).

And I'm not yet comfortable breaking search for it (as shown in the 
screenshot). I'd rather switch to distributing regular HTML files if there 
isn't a way to have both.

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Václav Dvořák]

Václav Dvořák  added the comment:

@steve.dower: I have cp1250 and I've had this issue for years now, on several 
Windows versions. Hoping Microsoft will fix it is obviously futile; can I ask 
for the Python community to apply the workaround suggested by Ma Lin please? 
Thanks.

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Steve Dower]

Steve Dower  added the comment:

> Let's promote ePub and PDF instead.

Find a good viewer we can bundle with the installer with equivalent 
search/index functionality and we can consider it.

More realistically, including the docs as unbundled HTML files and relying on 
the default browser is probably an all-around better idea.

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Inada Naoki]

Inada Naoki  added the comment:

I think it's time to abandon chm file.  It is too old.  MS doesn't maintain it 
anymore.
Let's promote ePub and PDF instead.

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Steve Dower]

Steve Dower  added the comment:

Can anyone confirm that you've got an active code page of something other than 
1252 ("standard" US English)? I'm not able to reproduce this easily, and I 
wonder if it's because of that setting.

Easiest way to check is in Python:
>>> import locale
>>> locale.getpreferredencoding()
'cp1252'

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versions: +Python 3.10, Python 3.8, Python 3.9

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Keelung Yang]

Keelung Yang  added the comment:

It's reoccurable in Python 3.8.3 (tags/v3.8.3:6f8c832, May 13 2020, 22:37:02) 
[MSC v.1924 64 bit (AMD64)] on windows version 10.0.19041.264

Just need to open "Python 3.8 Manuals (64-bit)" --> index --> input 'p' on 
keyboard.

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Ma Lin]

Ma Lin  added the comment:

I solved this thoroughly: Format disk C: and install a clean Windows 10.

Don't forget to backup important files in C:\Users\\ folder.

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Christian Ullrich]

Christian Ullrich  added the comment:

Ma Lin, thanks for the suggestion!

Yes, it looks like this option fixes the problem. I can reproduce the crash at 
will with a .chm built without this option, and not at all with one that has it 
on.

If the .chm's directory is not writable, the .chw will be created, and later 
reused from, %APPDATA%\Microsoft\HTML Help.

Unfortunately, sphinx apparently has no facility for setting this option to Yes 
in the generated .hhp file, so it will have to be modified before compilation.

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Ma Lin]

Ma Lin  added the comment:

I suffered this problem more than one years.
Here is a solution, before compiling the chm, modify like this:

--- D:\Python-3.7.1\Doc\build\htmlhelp\python371.hhpSun Dec 02 13:12:37 2018
+++ D:\fix_crash\python371.hhp  Sun Dec 02 13:05:57 2018
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 [OPTIONS]
 Binary TOC=No
-Binary Index=No
+Binary Index=Yes
 Compiled file=python371.chm
 Contents file=python371.hhc
 Default Window=python371
 
The chm will generate a binary file python371.chw in the same folder when first 
opened.
No longer crash, but duplicated entries don't show Title anymore, see the 
attached picture.

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nosy: +Ma Lin
Added file: https://bugs.python.org/file47967/binary_index.png

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[issue35228] Index search in CHM help crashes viewer

[Christian Ullrich]

New submission from Christian Ullrich :

Typing into the index keyword field frequently crashes the CHM viewer with the 
first or second character. The Python CHMs are the only ones that I see this 
crash with; it started around 3.6 or so.

>From event log:

Faulting application name: hh.exe, version: 10.0.17134.1, time stamp: 0xa0eff942
Faulting module name: hhctrl.ocx, version: 10.0.17134.48, time stamp: 0x412ce02a
Exception code: 0xc005
Fault offset: 0x000387b2
Faulting process ID: 0x3558
Faulting application start time: 0x01d47b3f8db53eef
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\hh.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\hhctrl.ocx
Report ID: 53f84d38-adb4-4c0b-bd45-9bce02406e6f
Faulting package full name: 
Faulting package-relative application ID: 

This particular crash involved the file from 3.7.1:

sha1(doc\python371.chm) = 1c0e2d861cadc759436bfac0a767c5bb633423f9

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assignee: docs@python
components: Documentation, Windows
messages: 329824
nosy: chrullrich, docs@python, paul.moore, steve.dower, tim.golden, zach.ware
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Index search in CHM help crashes viewer
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.7

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