’’’ Anyone else getting these all the time?

Self | 1/7/2016 | Boomer

[imardmd1]

Sorry, errors:

>>. . . constructed in the "Tour Your Reply" box, . . . <<

>>. . . the site can be accessed by everyone inexpensively . . .<<

[daniel1212]

AFIK, the transformation of "smart" quoteation marks, apostrophes, em-dashes, and other non-ASCII text into gobbledegook is not a bug in the FR software.

Actually, although there were some strange looking characters occasionally appearing in the titles of articles before, the current issues is a relatively recent development and thus it has been the subject of many threads, and you may be interested in this one in particular. And see the neat free offerings of cynwoody here and here.

[minnesota_bound]

#3 I have never noticed either but then again I cannot spel......

[daniel1212]

Sorry, errors:

You also had the misspelled "quoteation," but any modern browser should mark such errors and enable right click correction. With my stiff fingers i make typos in every sentence, so I thank God for auto spell check and those who code it!

[MosesKnows]

It happens with quotation marks, apostrophes, and hyphens

I fix it the same way you do but isn't the real question; why now and not before.

[daniel1212]

I get them...only on Free Republic...I thought it was some kinda secret code

Well, it was until your exposed it!

[metmom]

That’s above my pay grace.

I don’t recall if there ever was a good answer from the boss.

Not saying there wasn’t, just that I didn’t see it or if I did it made no sense to me and I just ignored it.

[daniel1212]

The server is mangling UTF-8 sequences for chars outside the 7-bit ASCII range. These consist of multiple bytes in the 80-FF range. The server looks at each byte of the multi-byte UTF-8 sequence and substitutes an HTML entity. The browser then renders the result as several characters of garbage instead of the character intended. E.g., E2 80 9C is UTF-8 for the left curly double quote. The server substitutes an entity for circumflex lower case a for the E2, the euro sign for 80, and the trademark symbol for 9C.

I am glad you are here.

[daniel1212]

I fix it the same way you do but isn't the real question; why now and not before.

As one who has been here 17.2 years you certainly are qualified to know what was before.

Thanks. Grace and peace thru the Lord Jesus

[musicman]

BFLR

[stuck_in_new_orleans]

LOL. Yeah let’s not ask the people getting 80k a quarter to fix it

[imardmd1]

Thanks for helping my poor attention to detail. I hope this didn’t throw anybody completely off. But it tells me somebody is reading it if only to try to get around this “smart punctuation” problem. Mostly, closely checking the “Preview” function would take cater of a lot of problems in replying or commenting.

[cynwoody]

AFIK, the transformation of "smart" quoteation marks, apostrophes, em-dashes, and other non-ASCII text into gobbledegook is not a bug in the FR software.

It is a bug. It used to work seemlessly (prior to sometime in October). It wasn't limited to curly quotes and em dashes. You could post whatever — Krautisch umlauts, Cyrillic, Chinese, Korean — and it would just work. That's the magic of UTF-8. Anything that screws up UTF-8 will cause a problem.

It is a necessary consequence of making it possible to let posting a reply be simple enough for the untutored participant to post a simple sentence or two constructed in the "Tour Reply" box, without having to resort to knowing HTML coding.

Not true. The bug will screw up your post, whether or not you post in HTML. It just depends on whether your post contains non-7-bit ASCII.

An interesting irony: You can post a straight-quoted string in non-HTML mode (meaning you didn't use any HTML tags, etc), and the FR server will helpfully convert your straight quotes into left and right curly quotes (aka smart quotes). The result will display just fine. However, if someone posts a reply containing a quote of your post, the smart quotes will display as garbage! That's because your correspondent will copy what he sees on the page and paste it into his reply. Then the server will see non-ASCII UTF-8 and substitute garbage for it.

[daniel1212]

Mostly, closely checking the “Preview” function would take cater of a lot of problems in replying or commenting.

As well as typos:), but smart quotes are only one of the many misrendered characters, while posting large portions of formatted texts and then correcting them all is time consuming. But one can just use Firefox or a derivative of it and the cynwoody Grease Monkey HTML Toolbar.

[glennaro]

The work-arounds are all well and good, but there are only two questions that need be addressed by the tech gurus at FR:

Can the problem be fixed?
If "yes", then what's taking so long?

[imardmd1]

OK. So where do I get the cynwoody Greaseball Monkey Toolbar. This is not a joke, right?

[daniel1212]

OK. So where do I get the cynwoody Greaseball Monkey Toolbar. This is not a joke, right?

No joke. The links were already given in a post to you above.

[imardmd1]

An interesting irony: You can post a straight-quoted string in non-HTML mode (meaning you didn't use any HTML tags, etc), and the FR server will helpfully convert your straight quotes into left and right curly quotes (aka smart quotes).

I already commented and demonstrated that in Posts $75, 76, 77, and 78 above, so everybody could see the phenomenon. And said almost what you said here. The text editor which operates on keystrokes sent to the "Your Reply" box, rather than just duplicating the keystrokes, tries to "smarten" them, probably into UTF-8.

Then in pasting from the editor's output back into the input, it tries to further smarten its already "smartened" results of the first pass through the editor. In my parlance, that is a programmed, deliberate function of the editor.

Therefore, the FR text "editor" operating on keystrokes put into the "Your Reply" box (and used in creating the initial articles) is not merely an editor. It is a text mangler, that has to be unsmartened by the user, every time.

I wish I were smarter myself, but I can figure that much out for myself.

Thanks for your observations!

[mdmathis6]

The problem seems to have disappeared for me when I downloaded Adblock!