Bug with WP Imports when post meta contains newlines

Hi,

I would like to report a bug with WP exports and imports. This has been haunting me for months and I finally figured it out tonight, after finding this post from 2 years ago that mentioned the issue to a plugin support forum:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-importer-how-to-import-multiline-post-metadata

I develop a plugin that saves custom fields containing user-entered multi-line text. From a textarea. It seems that when this user-entered text contains windows-styles newlines (\r\n), it gets serialized incorrectly in the export.

Given an export file from a client’s WP installation tonight, the post meta fields looked like they were there, but they were totally ignored during the import process.

I went through the file by hand and corrected all of the post meta field serializations, and then the file was imported correctly, with all post meta fields intact. Here’s what I did:
(on my mac)
1 – Find any multiline custom field and replace all newline characters (in case there were any weird characters being used)
2 – highlight the serialized string containing the newline, and update it’s character count. This change corresponded exactly to removing one character per line (a string with 10 newlines would need to go from something like s:214:”…” to s:204:”…”

I don’t believe the first step was necessary, because the character count didn’t change from before I replaced the newlines to after I replaced them – it was less than the serialized count to begin with. My best guess right now is that it has something to do with the crossover from a user using Windows to the server running on UNIX. The string contains windows-style newlines (\r\n) but gets printed through a UNIX file writer that uses unix-style newlines (\n), and therefore the string gets shorter when it’s written to the file, so it doesn’t match it’s serialized character count, which causes the entire custom field to be skipped in the import process.

I’m making stuff up though — does anyone actually know what’s going on, or what can be done about it?