Testing "exotic" characters

Unfortunately it is still possible to “break” the system by pasting in some characters.

We had one this morning.

I don’t know what exactly they are (especially as I have no way to access the post in question) but a good candidate might be certain emoticons, probably resulting from a copy/paste operation from some windows or mac program; or possibly from a tablet. The result is a post which is visible under its subject but if you click on it, nothing happens.

Probably the best way to clean up such text is a copy/paste into Notepad and from that a copy/paste into the forum edit box. That should strip out anything invalid.

Thanks. Fixed that now, I think. It was a bit obscure. In those little previews we can’t show the whole post, so we just show 200 characters worth. We need to remove HTML tags, because we don’t want images and formatting to appear, but we don’t want quotes to appear either. The only way to know when something is a quote is to use HTML. So first we remove quotes, then we remove HTML tags, then chop to 200 characters. The trouble is that some characters, like the apostrophe when cut and pasted from Word (because actually it uses a right single quotation mark) get converted to their entity codes, which are several characters long like this " ’ ". If these happen on the 200 character boundary we end up chopping them in half so you get &#…. So I’ve changed it so that we convert most of them to normal, single character codes which can’t get chopped in half.

The geeks can now all have fun and games of typing characters that will get converted to multibyte entity codes that happen at exactly 200 characters and break it all over again…

Here’s one for David…

I just noticed a tiny bug on the homepage. The page preview pane doesn’t always show an apostrophe correctly. " ’ " becomes “&#x”. Ok, I’m nitpicking and no, I’m not an IT test specialist. See the uploaded screenshot.

I’ve occasionally wondered who chose the name for the beautiful town of Bellano, on the shores of Lago di Como…

Yes indeed. Some 15 years ago Kansas City Star had to publish a correction after they used n instead of ñ in a classified advert entitled “La fiesta de quince años”.

Brilliant! Btw, I meant only one ‘funny’ character in that sentence, not in Spanish as a language.

Don’t forget ñ (which is an actual letter in its own right, not some kind of accented version of n – año and ano mean quite different things)

Yes indeed. Some 15 years ago Kansas City Star had to publish a correction after they used n instead of ñ in a classified advert entitled “La fiesta de quince años”.

Now, let’s try the above in Spanish (only one ‘funny’ character): No sólo usted, Jason!

Only one funny character in Spanish? Don’t forget ñ (which is an actual letter in its own right, not some kind of accented version of n – año and ano mean quite different things), and ü (eg, vergüenza)

And こんにちは to you, Achimha.

Good to know that 您好 (Chinese) and خوش (Urdu) work as well.

My brother is getting married on the island of Ærø next week.

I’ve pretty much exhausted my knowledge of foreign languages now…

السلام عليكم