I was making some hypertext links to pop up text and I got them to work..I then thought I'd copy, paste and edit to try and make it less work. The new text was "washed" in Notepad to remove any unwanted formatting.

However, when I then tried to view the slide (Shift+F5), the whole screen was blank. I closed the course and opened it again (BIG MISTAKE) and the entire course has been corrupted because I now get a window saying "The module could not be openend. Line:634 Pos:551 An invalid character was found in text content"

What on earth am I to do about this? How do I find this character? How come it got put in in the first place?

All help very much apreciated.

David[:confused:][:confused:][:confused:][:confused:]

Hi, David,

This is in fact some invalid character that breaks XML structure. Sometimes they appear after copy-paste of complex texts. To fix it:
1. Open 1.xml (or [somenumber].xml) with Notepad (or better Notepad++ - it is free and light programmers editor)
2. Go to line with error (Ctrl-G)
3. Go to mentioned position in line.
4. Usually "bad" character looks like empty rectangle or some strange symbol and can be easily located. Delete it and save file.
It should become accessible after that.

if this happens to you, copy the 1.xml file into notepad, then open a word doc and create a table of many hundreds of rows and 2 columns. insert the xml content into the table, checking that each row gets its own line. Then number the other column automatically. go the the line that's been identified as being the cause of the problem and you should see somthing not right there. then use FInd to find this in the xml document and correct it there.
COurselab should then open up, but you still need to go to the actual text and, although it will look 100% OK, you need to delete what's there and retype it back in. Then it should work! Good luck - contact me if you need any more help.

It's also worth doing a bit of versioning.. Once you get to a point where you've invested a few hours work copy the myworksofar.wcl somewhere else.
If you do this at the start and end of a session then you only loose a small ammount of time and not potentially everything.