Export creating blank / empty files

[Chipmonk2]

Hi

I'm trying to move my existing ttrss installation to FreshRSS. Following your readme, I configured export_ttrss.php as directed and ran
php ./export_ttrss.php --ttrss-user test
The script wrote:

Exporting 13 feeds for user test ...
Exported 4282 articles for user test into 5 files.

Unfortunately all these files were empty:

-rw-r--r--  1 www   wheel     0 Mar 25 22:34 ttrss-test.00000001.json
-rw-r--r--  1 www   wheel     0 Mar 25 22:34 ttrss-test.00000002.json
-rw-r--r--  1 www   wheel     0 Mar 25 22:34 ttrss-test.00000003.json
-rw-r--r--  1 www   wheel     0 Mar 25 22:34 ttrss-test.00000004.json
-rw-r--r--  1 www   wheel     0 Mar 25 22:34 ttrss-test.00000005.json

I'm not sure where to look for the issue as it didn't tell me what's wrong nor didn't write any logfile.
Can you give me a starter for this?

Some Info about the system:

OS: FreeBSD 14.2
PHP: php --version
PHP 8.3.15 (cli) (built: Mar 24 2025 20:43:46) (NTS)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.3.15, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v8.3.15, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

TTRSS: It displays "unknown" in the WebUI, DB schema version is 139 i that helps

I can spin up another vm with PHP7.4 if that helps (maybe an incompatibility with PHP8.x?)

Greetings,
Chip

[robertdahlem]

Well, the database connection is ok or you wouldn't get 13 feeds with 4282 articles. Obviously there is something wrong with export_translate().

Yes, if you have the means then I would kindly ask you to try it with PHP 7.4. If that doesn't work I will have to add some debugging.

[Chipmonk2]

Hi - Thanks for your reply

I tried with this system:
OS:
FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE r354233 GENERIC amd64
PHP:

PHP 7.4.30 (cli) (built: Mar 26 2025 14:21:28) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.4.30, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

Installed modules are:

[PHP Modules]
bcmath
Core
ctype
curl
date
dom
fileinfo
filter
gmp
hash
iconv
json
libxml
mbstring
mysqlnd
pcre
PDO
pdo_mysql
pdo_sqlite
Phar
posix
Reflection
session
SimpleXML
SPL
sqlite3
standard
tokenizer
xml
xmlreader
xmlwriter
Zend OPcache
zip
zlib

[Zend Modules]
Zend OPcache

But got the same results unfortunately.
Let me know if I can do anything to help

Greetings,
Chip

[Chipmonk2]

For better readability as a seperate comment.
I narrowed it down to "encode_json" failing in line 233.
I traced several variables with var_dump and everything seems to go well until encode_json - this is returing "false", indicating an error with the json encoding. Not sure why though.

I exported a feed with batch-size 2 and var_dumped $batch immediatly before the fwrite command - maybe this helps:
Note that "content" really is empty, I checked with the database.

array(1) {
  ["items"]=>
  array(2) {
    [0]=>
    array(7) {
      ["categories"]=>
      array(1) {
        [0]=>
        string(28) "user/-/state/com.google/read"
      }
      ["guid"]=>
      string(87) "http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Displays-zum-Durchgucken-1245569.html/from/rss09"
      ["origin"]=>
      array(4) {
        ["title"]=>
        string(17) "heise online News"
        ["feedUrl"]=>
        string(46) "https://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise-atom.xml"
        ["htmlUrl"]=>
        string(32) "https://www.heise.de/newsticker/"
        ["category"]=>
        string(7) "IT News"
      }
      ["url"]=>
      string(87) "http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Displays-zum-Durchgucken-1245569.html/from/rss09"
      ["title"]=>
      string(24) "Displays zum Durchgucken"
      ["content"]=>
      string(0) ""
      ["published"]=>
      string(19) "2011-05-18 18:35:39"
    }
    [1]=>
    array(7) {
      ["categories"]=>
      array(1) {
        [0]=>
        string(28) "user/-/state/com.google/read"
      }
      ["guid"]=>
      string(100) "http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Apple-an-neuer-SIM-Karte-interessiert-1245492.html/from/rss09"
      ["origin"]=>
      array(4) {
        ["title"]=>
        string(17) "heise online News"
        ["feedUrl"]=>
        string(46) "https://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise-atom.xml"
        ["htmlUrl"]=>
        string(32) "https://www.heise.de/newsticker/"
        ["category"]=>
        string(7) "IT News"
      }
      ["url"]=>
      string(100) "http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Apple-an-neuer-SIM-Karte-interessiert-1245492.html/from/rss09"
      ["title"]=>
      string(37) "Apple an neuer SIM-Karte interessiert"
      ["content"]=>
      string(0) ""
      ["published"]=>
      string(19) "2011-05-18 18:35:39"
    }
  }
}
string(1076) "{"items":[{"categories":["user\/-\/state\/com.google\/read"],"guid":"http:\/\/www.heise.de\/newsticker\/meldung\/Displays-zum-Durchgucken-1245569.html\/from\/rss09","origin":{"title":"heise online News","feedUrl":"https:\/\/www.heise.de\/newsticker\/heise-atom.xml","htmlUrl":"https:\/\/www.heise.de\/newsticker\/","category":"IT News"},"url":"http:\/\/www.heise.de\/newsticker\/meldung\/Displays-zum-Durchgucken-1245569.html\/from\/rss09","title":"Displays zum Durchgucken","content":"","published":"2011-05-18 18:35:39"},{"categories":["user\/-\/state\/com.google\/read"],"guid":"http:\/\/www.heise.de\/newsticker\/meldung\/Apple-an-neuer-SIM-Karte-interessiert-1245492.html\/from\/rss09","origin":{"title":"heise online News","feedUrl":"https:\/\/www.heise.de\/newsticker\/heise-atom.xml","htmlUrl":"https:\/\/www.heise.de\/newsticker\/","category":"IT News"},"url":"http:\/\/www.heise.de\/newsticker\/meldung\/Apple-an-neuer-SIM-Karte-interessiert-1245492.html\/from\/rss09","title":"Apple an neuer SIM-Karte interessiert","content":"","published":"2011-05-18 18:35:39"}]}"

The corresponding SQL dump for these two entries would look like this:

CREATE TABLE `ttrss_entries` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `title` text NOT NULL,
  `guid` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `link` text NOT NULL,
  `updated` datetime NOT NULL,
  `content` longtext NOT NULL,
  `content_hash` varchar(250) NOT NULL,
  `no_orig_date` tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
  `date_entered` datetime NOT NULL,
  `date_updated` datetime NOT NULL,
  `num_comments` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
  `comments` varchar(250) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `author` varchar(250) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `cached_content` longtext DEFAULT NULL,
  `plugin_data` longtext DEFAULT NULL,
  `lang` varchar(2) DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_swedish_ci;

--
-- Dumping data for table `ttrss_entries`
--

INSERT INTO `ttrss_entries` (`id`, `title`, `guid`, `link`, `updated`, `content`, `content_hash`, `no_orig_date`, `date_entered`, `date_updated`, `num_comments`, `comments`, `author`, `cached_content`, `plugin_data`, `lang`) VALUES
(1, 'Displays zum Durchgucken', 'http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Displays-zum-Durchgucken-1245569.html/from/rss09', 'http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Displays-zum-Durchgucken-1245569.html/from/rss09', '2011-05-18 18:35:39', '', 'SHA1:da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709', 1, '2011-05-18 18:35:39', '2011-05-21 14:31:20', 0, '', '', NULL, NULL, 'de'),
(2, 'Apple an neuer SIM-Karte interessiert', 'http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Apple-an-neuer-SIM-Karte-interessiert-1245492.html/from/rss09', 'http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Apple-an-neuer-SIM-Karte-interessiert-1245492.html/from/rss09', '2011-05-18 18:35:39', '', 'SHA1:da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709', 1, '2011-05-18 18:35:39', '2011-05-21 13:31:31', 0, '', '', NULL, NULL, 'de');

--
-- Indexes for dumped tables
--

--
-- Indexes for table `ttrss_entries`
--
ALTER TABLE `ttrss_entries`
  ADD PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  ADD UNIQUE KEY `guid` (`guid`),
  ADD KEY `ttrss_entries_date_entered_index` (`date_entered`),
  ADD KEY `ttrss_entries_guid_index` (`guid`),
  ADD KEY `ttrss_entries_updated_idx` (`updated`);

--
-- AUTO_INCREMENT for dumped tables
--

--
-- AUTO_INCREMENT for table `ttrss_entries`
--
ALTER TABLE `ttrss_entries`
  MODIFY `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, AUTO_INCREMENT=782273;
COMMIT;

(Yes - my archive really dates back to 2011, this is the reason why I'm trying to migrate everything instead of just making everything new)

Greetings,

[Chipmonk2]

I think I got it. Basically an issue with the characterset. Not sure if my setup ist special - but I had to add
;charset=utf8
to my connection string in export_ttrs.config.php so it looks like this now:

$db_connect="mysql:host=dbserver.domain;dbname=tinyrss;charset=utf8";
$db_user="username";
$db_pass="topsecret";

I also changed the part around the actual output to the file like this:

$Temp=json_encode($batch,JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE | JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES | JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);
fwrite($export, $Temp);

to make the output more readable and deal with some quirks I might have in my db.
The resulting json seems to be valid (linted it online).

Greetings,

[robertdahlem]

I think I got it. Basically an issue with the characterset. Not sure if my setup ist special - but I had to add ;charset=utf8 to my connection string in export_ttrs.config.php ...

Great news! Congratulations for figuring this out.

Do you mind if I point to this in the FAQ and close the issue?

[Chipmonk2]

Not at all :-) I'm glad to help.

Greetings,
Chip