What causes "memory body must be a string." in affaan-m/ECC?

Coerce with String(value) if the value is a known scalar, or buffer.toString('utf8') for Buffers.

memory body must be a string.

Error message

memory body must be a string.

What it means

normalizeBody requires the memory body to be a JavaScript string before any other processing. The library throws this when the body field is any other type, because all subsequent checks (control characters, trimming, byte-size limits) are string operations.

Solutions

Coerce with String(value) if the value is a known scalar, or buffer.toString('utf8') for Buffers.
Fix the producer so it always assigns a string to the body field.
If the body may be absent, decide the default (e.g. '') before calling — but note an empty/whitespace-only body is rejected separately.
Unwrap nested objects: obj.text -> obj.text instead of passing obj.

Example fix

// before
normalizeMemory({ body: fs.readFileSync(p), ... })
// after
normalizeMemory({ body: fs.readFileSync(p, 'utf8'), ... })

Defensive patterns

Strategy: type-guard

Validate before calling

if (typeof body !== 'string') body = typeof body === 'object' && body !== null && 'text' in body ? String(body.text) : String(body ?? '');

Type guard

const isString = (v) => typeof v === 'string';

Try / catch

try { normalizeMemory(mem); } catch (e) { if (e.message === 'memory body must be a string.') { mem.body = String(mem.body); } else throw e; }

Prevention

Read files with the 'utf8' encoding option instead of passing Buffers
Type body as string in the memory document interface
Unwrap nested {text} objects at the producer
Log typeof body when a save fails to catch silent undefined

When it happens

Trigger: Calling normalizeMemory with body set to null, undefined, a number, a boolean, an object {text: '...'}, an array of strings/lines, or a Buffer from a file read.

Common situations: Loading the body from JSON where the field was accidentally nested; passing a file's raw Buffer instead of buffer.toString('utf8'); a template/function result returning undefined on some code path; YAML frontmatter parsed with a numeric-looking body.

Understand the failure class

Background: Type mismatch errors: IllegalArgumentException, TypeError and type guards across 150 open-source libraries — this error's family across 150 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of affaan-m/ECC@8321021c54 (2026-09-16). Data as JSON: /api/errors/2935e60c1499653d. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at scripts/lib/memory-vault-format.js:146

  }, []);
}

function validateTimestamp(value, label) {
  const normalized = asNonEmptyString(value, label, 64);
  const parsed = new Date(normalized);
  if (
    !ISO_TIMESTAMP_PATTERN.test(normalized)
    || Number.isNaN(parsed.getTime())
    || parsed.toISOString() !== normalized
  ) {
    throw new Error(`${label} must be an ISO-8601 timestamp.`);
  }
  return normalized;
}

function normalizeBody(value) {
  if (typeof value !== 'string') {
    throw new Error('memory body must be a string.');
  }
  if (hasUnsafeControlCharacters(value, true)) {
    throw new Error('memory body must not contain unsafe control or bidirectional formatting characters.');
  }
  const normalized = value.trim();
  if (normalized.length === 0) {
    throw new Error('memory body must contain non-whitespace context.');
  }
  if (Buffer.byteLength(normalized, 'utf8') > MAX_BODY_BYTES) {
    throw new Error(`memory body is too large (maximum ${MAX_BODY_BYTES} bytes).`);
  }
  return normalized;
}

function normalizeMemory(memory) {
  if (!memory || typeof memory !== 'object' || Array.isArray(memory)) {
    throw new Error('memory must be an object.');
  }

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