args-out-of-range error with ac-html

Question

I tried using ac-html recently since I'm an auto-complete user and I'd like to have HTML completion in html-mode and web-mode buffers. However, it has been acting somewhat strangely and throws an error whenever I type anything in an html-mode or web-mode buffer:

auto-complete error: (args-out-of-range <name-of-current-buffer> 0 2)

As a result of this error, auto-complete-mode is disabled in the current buffer. However, perhaps even more strangely, if I turn on auto-complete-mode after it was disabled by the error, everything works as expected and I get auto-completion. Yet, this only seems to happen in html-mode buffers; i.e., I do not get auto-completion after re-enabling auto-complete-mode in web-mode buffers.

I have ac-html set up for both html-mode and web-mode like so in my init files:

;; Better completion for html-mode
(defun setup-ac-for-html ()
  (require 'ac-html)
  (require 'ac-html-default-data-provider)
  (ac-html-enable-data-provider 'ac-html-default-data-provider)
  (ac-html-setup)
  (setq ac-sources '(ac-source-html-tag
                     ac-source-html-attr
                     ac-source-html-attrv)))

;; Better completion for web-mode
(defun setup-ac-for-web-mode ()
  (require 'ac-html)
  (require 'ac-html-default-data-provider)

  (add-to-list 'web-mode-ac-sources-alist
               '("html" . (ac-source-html-tag
                           ac-source-html-attr
                           ac-source-html-attrv))))

...

(add-hook 'html-mode-hook                      'setup-ac-for-html)
(add-hook 'web-mode-before-auto-complete-hooks 'setup-ac-for-web-mode)

How can I get this error to stop happening so that I don't have to re-enable auto-complete-mode after said error? Also, why does this re-enabling seemingly not work for web-mode?

I'm using Emacs 25.1.1 on OS X 10.11.6.

Answer 1

Okay, so I've come up with a couple of hacky fixes for these problems and have been able to sufficiently enable auto-completion with auto-complete-mode via said fixes. I managed to get web-mode completion working by adjusting my configuration to be in accordance with the code from their website for setting up auto-completion:

(defun setup-ac-for-web-mode ()
       (setq web-mode-ac-sources-alist
             '(("css"  . (ac-source-css-property))
               ("html" . (ac-source-words-in-buffer ac-source-abbrev)))))
    ...
    (add-to-list 'ac-modes 'web-mode)
    ...
    (add-hook 'web-mode-before-auto-complete-hooks 'setup-ac-for-web-mode)

Mind you this new setup for web-mode is no longer using ac-html, but it seems that web-mode has provided their own auto-complete sources, which work well enough for me. The next fix that I've made enables ac-htmlto work for html-mode itself:

(add-hook 'html-mode-hook
          #'(lambda ()
              (run-with-idle-timer 0.1 nil (lambda () (progn
                                                        (auto-complete-mode 1)
                                                        (auto-complete-mode -1)
                                                        (auto-complete-mode 1))))))

As you can see, it's quite crude and all that it does is automate the process of turning auto-complete-mode on, off, and on again shortly after html-mode is initially invoked in a given buffer. I'm not sure why that works, but it does and now I have auto-completion for html-mode as well as web-mode.