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kucai's Diary

Some JOSM error message are fatal if you are not careful

Posted by kucai on 7 February 2022 in English.

So I got this message from JOSM:

Error message(untranslated): Placeholder node not found for reference -104469 in https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/741879858

Tried various ways to fix the error but it was getting late, so I saved the whole thing as a joz session to tinker with it later.

Next day I tried to load the saved session. No bueno! josm wouldn’t load the data layer because of the error.

Arrgghh.. cue the rage meme. That layer got a complete bus route that I started from beginning to the end, with the accompanying highways chopping, poi adds along the way and all kind of stuff..

Discussion

Comment from vorpalblade-kaart on 7 February 2022 at 16:04

Did you file a bug report at https://josm.openstreetmap.de/newticket ?

Please keep in mind that developers cannot fix items that they do not know about, and filing good bug reports is a way to (a) tell the developer about the problem and (b) how to reproduce it.

My best guess: something deleted a new node that was in way/741879858 without updating the way. Which shouldn’t happen.

Anyway, notes on how to fix the problem:

Unzip the JOSM session file (.joz) into an empty directory.
Open the layers/{some number}/{some name}.osm file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad). The {some number} placeholder is some number, and {some name} should be the data layer name.
Search for -104469 and delete all references to it. Example (simplified for readability):

<way id="741879858" version="1">
    <nd ref="-104469"/>
</way>

In this case, only delete the <nd ref="-104469"/> text.

Save the file
At this point, you can either create a new zip file or just open the edited OSM file in JOSM.

Comment from kucai on 8 February 2022 at 01:53

Thank you. will try. hopefully not all is lost. Also bug report.

kucai's Diary

Some JOSM error message are fatal if you are not careful

Discussion

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