Unable to complete this request due to an error after site migration.

[Zahari M.]

Hi

I was looking in the forums for a solution to this problem I had...

The error message was Unable to complete this request due to an error.

A forum search showed me that a few others have been perplexed by this problem too. Having tried clearing the sessions folder, checking file permissions and the .htaccess file contents, still no luck. And like someone else, no error messages to help out.

This problem happened when I tried to migrate a site from one server to another. Until today, this has always gone smoothly for me, but for some reason I could not get rid of the error message.

When we migrate, chances are great that we will have to use a different database name, database user and database password. And so we edit our config.php file. I'm sure many of you do this all the time.

I recently updated my Mac to El-Capitan and after lots of tests, I found my problem was related to editing the config.php file...

What was happening was that when I edited the config.php file in Text Edit, some of the single quotes that surround each of the new values for our database configuration suddenly ended up changing shape from a perfectly vertical single quote into a slanted single quote. One needs to look extremely closely at every single quote that surrounds every value you edited.

So, the next time you change any values in your config.php file, pay extremely close attention to those single quotes!

In my case I ended up copying a perfectly vertical single quote and using that to paste replace all those slanted ones that appeared. Sometimes I had to repeat the operation.

Buggy TextEdit program? Buggy Keyboard? Wrong settings? Wrong keyboard language? Not sure what is the reason.

Just check each and every single quote after you have edited config.php

Hope this saves someone half a day!

Cheers

[LostKobrakai]

To put some light on the differently shaped symbols you're describing: The straight ones are from an typographically background not even quotes, but unit-symbols " for inch or arc-minute and ' for arc-second. The slanted ones you're describing are the typographically correct symbols for quotations and are most of the time formed like commas. As TextEdit is not a code editor, but a simple text writing tool it can be the case that quotes are automatically converted to the correct ones, which, as you noticed, do not work in code as they are other symbols. For those questioning, why correct quotes are most of the time not even on the keyboard layout, that's a remnant of the time of typewriters, where space, material cost and letter distribution where driving the keyboard layout evolution. Typographic correctness just wasn't valued as much as those other issues.

Edit: For code editing I'd suggest using dedicated software, which won't make any automatic typography replacements and sometimes even highlight such errors.