Its OK I sorted it basically by taking a small amount of notes at the bottom of the file and pasting them above the gibberish, then deleting as described in post. Thanks!

If you spent as much time reading the forum as you did posting then you would know of the 3 threads that solved this problem.

<--------

I have the same problem, it's a corrupt file or entry in your notes folder caused from a computer crash during a game in which you hold notes on a player. Email support for instructions on the remedy.

props for these instructions, followed them and worked perfectly.

Stars has been freezing on me all day. Pretty annoying because now my time banks expired and if it happens again I'm in trouble. Anyone else having this problem?

okay i fixed my note file last week and have avoided taking notes on the "@() type crap
and now my xml notes1 file is back up to almost 500mb.

So not only did i lose 1-2 months worth of notes i am back to square one.

So i now have 3 notes files
1 text one
xml notes and xml notes1

is it safe to delete the problem one?

There are still problems with the current PokerStars client regarding Notes.XML. The PokerStars software continues to "corrupt" the file.

Thanks Lyrrad for pointing me in the right direction. The XML file does appear to be in UTF-8 format. My understanding is that UTF-8 is the default formatting for XML files. Also the first line of Notes.XML should have clued me in:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

On Jan 29 I moved Notes.XML from my Pokerstars directory and it re-created Notes.XML from Notes.TXT. My Notes.TXT file has not been updated since Dec 23, 2009 (and only by the PokerStars software). After the Notes.XML file was created, I saved a "clean" copy of it outside the PokerStars directory.

Today, I looked at the bytes in the "clean" Notes.XML file. I looked for a player that had "funny" characters in it. Pokerstars did fix the problem in that the name did not have 2 MB of characters in it as it did earlier. If I am reading the UTF-8 definition correctly it looks like the PokerStars software did not completely fix the name from the Notes.TXT file. Recall from my earlier post that the "funny" characters had the high order bits set (in hex that would be 0xFF) in Notes.TXT. I found that those 0xFF bits were put into the "clean" Notes.XML using a 3 byte UTF-8 format to represent that one character. PokerStars software should probably clear the high-order byte of these "funny" characters during the conversion to Notes.XML. If those bits are cleared, then a 2 byte UTF-8 format should be used to save the "funny" character.

Ok, so fast forward to today. I now look at my current Notes.XML file in the PokerStars directory. The name with the "funny" characters has grown to about 200 bytes of garbage where one "funny" character should be.

My original Notes.TXT file has over 72,000 player names in it, and there are almost 300 names with "funny" characters in them. By "funny" I mean characters that cannot be represented by the 7 bits in an ASCII character. Once PokerStars fixes this problem, I'm hoping to extract good notes from my corrupted Notes.XML files that I have from Jan 14 and Jan 29.

Good luck to PokerStars and everyone else who is experiencing this problem.

--Tommy

Get a good text editor. Search and REPLACE-ALL each bizarro character. There are only about 20 of them. Save xml file. You may have to keep doing this every now and then until they get this totally fixed.

I don't trust this solution to the problem. Anyone who manually edits the "bizarro" characters from their corrupted XML file runs the risk of corrupting a valid player name that should have that "bizarro" character. Once that name has been mangled by you, any current notes on that player will likely never be displayed again in the PokerStars client Notes window.

The reason you might see a "bizarro" character while using your text editor is the underlying UTF-8 byte representation in the file. For example, I have a player name from my Notes.TXT file with this character (0xF8):

ø

On my computer that displays as a slashed zero.

Pokerstars took that character and put it into the new XML file. If I look at the XML file using Notepad.exe it displays as a square box:



If I look at it with version of Microsoft Word it looks like this:

￸

Three characters that look like an "i" with an umlaut, an upside down question mark, and something like a comma.

Yes, those 3 characters are displayed instead of the one real character in the name (ø).

If you delete any one of those characters from the XML file, you will permanently have changed the player name in the file which is something you don't want to do.

If you can tell me how a "good text editor" displays and saves the actual bytes to the file, then you might have a chance to use that editor to manually "fix" your file.

--Tommy

When is pokerstars going to fix this? It's getting aggravating.

I just did the replace all trick and it worked with the regular windows notepad. My Note file was 500MB and it took me maybe 10 minutes. I hope stars fixes this problem. There are a lot of guys I want to write notes on but am too scared to mess up my file.

Yeah you're right. I don't care about corrupting the names that are already corrupted because there aren't that many of them. But there could have been a bunch with (Ã) in them or something. Most of the bizarro chars though are stuff like (™, or ¢) that I'm not too worried about showing up in many usernames.

I had to go in and do it again because as is known, Stars starts re-corrupting the file again immediately. I just deleted the entire note this time. There were probably 30 or 40.

The sad thing is the players with weird characters in their names are usually crazy scandies, so I would like to have those notes. But not worth the hassle to keep doing this. Maybe I'll go re-add them from the file I backed up once Stars fixes this problem. I would recommend if you're really worried about losing notes. As you can always go back and find them in your backup of the corrupted file. The names are pretty easy to identify since they're 10,000 chars long.


Here's what it looks like in UltraEdit fwiw:
<note player="JanoIbaÃÆâ€â„Â
....
™ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã‚ ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â₂¢ÃÂ
...
ƒÆ’‚ ÃƒÂÃâ
....
¬Å¡Ãƒâ€šÃ‚±ez" label="0">very bad</note>

(Except each one has about 10,000 more of the bad characters in each corrupted entry. )


Also even single quotes are fried:
<note player="JD\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'s Dogger" label="0">AA open push first hand, tricky</note>

The client seems to be going in and adding another \ (escape char for quotes), every time. Ugh.


I emailed Stars about this just making sure they know about it, and if they had any kind of ETA. Will report back what they say.

lol, i emailed them a few weeks about it asking why they cannot resolve this issue a little bit quicker and got the following response:

Seems it will be fixed soon.

On February 1, Pokerstars support asked me to e-mail them my Notes.TXT and Notes.XML files in a ZIP file. I sent it on February 1.

On Feb 5, Pokerstars support responded:

The zip file you sent was too large and did not arrive. You can send the zip file through a web site called senduit.

It took them 4 days to realize that an attachment was missing?

lol @ least they are trying to do something FWIW.

FYP

Today when I started playing I noticed that I lost the notes on some regulars I knew I had marked. For the last month or so I have periodically noticed that i've lost my notes on certain players I knew I had notes on. However, there are still some players that I marked over a year a go that their notes are still there. Does anyone have any idea why I'm losing some of my notes?

Bump, same problem...any1?

Search found:

I had the same problem.

Here's how I seem to have fixed it.

- ensure pokerstars is closed

- backup notes.txt and notes.xml into a folder.

- open notes.xml (residing in Pokerstars folder) in Wordpad

- scroll through 1 page per time looking for obvious player with long messed up characters next to them.

- delete each <note fnsfohsdfhkdsfskdghksdgshghsdg> type lines

- My .xml file was 500mb. I'd advise after each deletion of <note fnsfohsdfhkdsfskdghksdgshghsdg> to save as this will make scrolling thru the file much easier. After editing my file was 534K.

- Once completed, save. Then go through the whole file again looking for any <note fnsfohsdfhkdsfskdghksdgshghsdg> you've missed.

- Load pokerstars up. Now make a note on a random player. Remember the table & player of course!

- Exit pokerstars, re-open pokerstars and then check the table/player to ensure the note has been saved.

Obviously now you have it working, do not make notes on players with a hyphen or non-standard characters in their name.

HAD TO DO THIS AGAIN... STARS SLACKIN....

My file is growing again too. It just went from 14 MB to 21 MB in one day.

I've been writing some software to examine these files. The next time I need to remove Notes.XML, I will replace the Notes.TXT file with one that does not have corrupted player names in it. My Notes.TXT has 70,000 names, and 295 were not properly written to that file by Pokerstars. At least next time I'll have a fighting chance to not have this additional corruption to Notes.XML.

I'm also going to eventually merge my copies of Notes.XML that I have periodically been saving into the final Notes.XML.

40 days and counting... and they still havent fixed this MAJOR bug.
Its one BLOODY note file.
I imagine they have lost alot of fish the last few weeks who wonder why pokerstars crashes when you try to log in to fast.
Fulltilt are up to 130k players now.. they had better sort this soon.

IM NOT GOING TO START DELEATING MY SYSTEM FILES AGAIN I ALREADY LOST 2 MONTHS WORTH OF FISH>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
NOTES 408MB
NOTES1 409MB

I really dont know what you people want - we can now find our favourite pros by clicking only one simple little button in the lobby not to mention the sexy little green bar at the top of the lobby showing us how close we are to earning another $10 Stellar reward and still you're not happy.

+1 priorities ftw

would you rather not be able to have those features but be able to play poker without the client crashing....

lets be serious< who wants to go back to the stone age where we would have to A. know who "JorgeArias" is AND B have to type his name in the search feature to know if this pokerstars pro is currently playing anything

i think we can all agree its well worth the small sacrifices like being able to play poker to be able to see how we would be coming on our bonuses if we were able to play poker

My personal favorite, when asked if I would be notified when the issue was resolved:

emphasis mine:

What about the LARGE AMOUNT OF TIME I spent in that F-ing hex editor manually editing 3,000,000 characters of text down to 125k?

Wow, ok PS customer service has always been great. But are you telling me that you can't put me on a mass e-mail list just to tell me when your F-up is fixed?

Thank you, come again.

EDIT: Imagine my displeasure this morning when I signed on and NONE of my notes were showing up in the lobby or at the tables.