Posted on 11/11/2015 6:35:44 PM PST by markomalley
I don't know if this has impacted anybody else, but in recent weeks, I've noticed that HTML special characters are not rendering properly in HTML posts.
For example, the character “ is rendering as “, the character ” is rendering as â€Â, and so on.
A screenshot of a typical thread is here:
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Needless to say, that is really irritating.
There is a workaround for this: replace these special characters with their corresponding HTML codes.
The ones that FR is currently having problems with are as follows:
| ‘ | "left single quote" | ‘ |
| ’ | "right single quote" | ’ |
| “ | "left double quote" | “ |
| ” | "right double quote" | ” |
| — | "em-dash" | — |
| – | "en-dash" | – |
| … | "ellipsis" | … |
You can do a global search and replace with pretty much any decent text editor out there.
However, in my experience, I've seen that it takes a few passes to catch all of the special characters in a document. You may need to do up to 7 passes in order to catch all of the characters.
This makes for a decent looking post, but it is a lot of repetition.
And I'm lazy.
Since I'm lazy, I did a little bit of research in order to figure out a "constructive" way to be lazy in this situation. I was looking for a text editor, similar to Notepad++, that supports macros (since I'm on Linux, I can't use Notepad++, except under Wine).
In doing my research, I think that I've found the solution that does EXACTLY what we need: Geany. Geany is a simple IDE environment that is supported under Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX. There is a plugin written for this editor / IDE that will automatically replace HTML special characters like the ones above with the applicable HTML code, thus eliminating our problems in one fell swoop!
In order to use this capability, the first step is to download and install the software (open source). Be sure to install both the software and the plugins.
The user interface:
First, you need to enable the appropriate plugin. Open up the plugin manager window by selecting "Tools" -- "Plugin Manager":
Then select the "HTML Characters" plugin:
To use this editor / IDE, you will want to paste in the text you wish to be "fixed".
Select all of the text that you've pasted into the environment ([ctrl]-A).
Then click on "Tools" -- "HTML Replacement" -- "Replace Characters in Selection"
And, Voila, all the problematic special characters in the text have been replaced with the corresponding HTML code.
(Note that if you were using plain text, you will now need to put a paragraph tag "<p>" at the beginning of each paragraph for it to format properly)
Strange characters showing up in FR posts — here’s a workaround
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Strange characters showing up in FR posts for a long time, ever since I have been here.— I can name a few of the odder ones.
Thanks for your help... But wouldn’t it be easier to just fix it once at the source?
I guess I asked for that one…
I h“ve no idea what you’re talking about.
I can't control what happens at the "source" (server side).
ping
I was asking about the problem yesterday and Jim said John is on it. It started after we got that malware warning here, and it may or may not be related to that.
What a novel idea.
I’m a strange character. Is that what the poster meant?
When & why did it start? I was in the hospital and when I returned it was already going on.
lol! Same thing I was thinking.
The forum missed you is why.
Mark — thanks. I have noticed these special characters showing up over the last week or so.
So are you suggesting each user perform this operation on each post they read .. or each block of text they post .. or what? I am confused as to what you are suggesting.
Lots of strange characters posting on FR. Any work around for that?
Good question.
First of all, I'm not mandating that anybody does anything. For myself, I like for articles I post to be as legible as possible. I enjoy reading articles that are legible as well. So if I can take a couple of steps to make sure that the articles are more legible, then so much the better. But I'm not trying to impose something on anybody.
Having said that…
I'm thinking it would be appropriate for articles...at least...so that they'd be legible.
For comments, I don't think it's as necessary.
Hopefully John will be able to fix the problem at the server side so that this isn't an issue, but in the interim, this would work. Using the Geany application to convert those special characters only takes a few seconds once you've installed it, so it's not too much of a hassle.
When & why did it start? I was in the hospital and when I returned it was already going on.
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Hope you are well!
Ain’t nobody got time for dat.
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