Uncaught Error: new Firebase failed

[panchotiya]

Hi... I get this error in the console Uncaught Error: new Firebase failed: First argument must be a valid firebase URL and the path can't contain ".", "#", "$", "[", or "]". How to solve this error please help me. Thanks in advance

[muaz-khan]

Can you share exact experiment link, please? Or otherwise the code you're trying.

Such issue occurs when we pass invalid character in the firebase URL; .e.g.

// look at this ------ /ABCDEF#$.[]
var firebase = new Firebase('https://chat.firebaseio.com/ABCDEF#$.[]');

To recover it; make sure you passed valid value in the constructors:

// it works
new RTCMultiConnection('valid-value');

// it fails
new RTCMultiConnection('invalid-value-#$[].');

// it works
new DataChannel('valid-value');

// it fails
new DataChannel('invalid-value-#$[].');

Whatever you pass over constructor is used in firebase URL. The thing you pass over constructor is known as channel or namespace.

[stiofand]

Actually this happens to me with a perfectly clean string to my firebase.io endpoint, its driving me crazy that there is no one addressing this issue in AngularFire

[Atrix1987]

were u able to resolve this... am going crazy with this issue

[muaz-khan]

@Atrix1987, following namespace always worked for me:

var namespace = location.href.replace(/\/|:|#|%|\.|\[|\]/g, '');

You can remove spaces as well:

var namespace = location.href.replace(/\/|:|#|%|\.|\[|\| ]/g, '');

var namespace = location.href.replace(/\/|:|#|%|\.|\[|\| ]/g, '');
var firebaseURL = '//chat.firebaseio.com/';
var firebase = new Firebase(firebaseURL + namespace);

There is firebase-debug.js; you can check it to see how URL is parsed, etc:

https://www.webrtc-experiment.com/firebase-debug.js

[34r7h]

i'm having this issue only on gh-pages but works fine in development. any ideas?

[muaz-khan]

The only limitations that Firebase applies are:

A child node's key cannot be longer than 768 bytes, nor deeper than 32 levels. It can include any unicode characters except for . $ # [ ] / and ASCII control characters 0-31 and 127.

Description	Limit	Notes
Depth of child nodes	32
Length of a key	768 bytes	UTF-8 encoded, cannot contain . $ # [ ] / or ASCII control characters 0-31 or 127
Size of one child value	10mb	UTF-8 encoded
Write from SDK	16mb	UTF-8 encoded
Write from REST	256mb
Nodes in a read operation	100 million

Ref: https://www.firebase.com/docs/web/guide/understanding-data.html

var firebaseChildNode = location.href
         .replace(/\/|:|#|\?|\$|\^|%|\.|`|~|!|@|\[|\||]|\|*. /g, '')
         .split('\n').join('').split('\r').join('');

var firebase = new Firebase('https://chat.firebaseio.com/'+ firebaseChildNode);