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squares(unidentified characters)

Started by Louisiana Night, August 13, 2004, 10:08:05 PM

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Louisiana Night

I put in a word, then a number, into the search engine. I got many squares in the previews. Anyone want to explain what is happening?

Yonkey

"A wish changes nothing. A decision changes everything."


Yonkey

#3
I don't see any squares, but I do see a lot of ' instead of apostrophes.  ::)
"A wish changes nothing. A decision changes everything."

Louisiana Night

#4
I get a ム39

This is fun  !!!

I typed (square)39

Jeysie

I get squares, too... it's what Opera does whenever it can't display a certain character.

From my n00b guess, it looks like the forum software turns apostrophes into their encoded counterparts, and the forum software is showing the 3 from the character code in the search results. Bizarre.

Peace & Luv, Liz

Louisiana Night


Yonkey

Yeah, I've noticed this forum having problems with smart quotes too (i.e. quotation marks that look like 66 and 99 as opposed to "").
"A wish changes nothing. A decision changes everything."

Jeysie

Lousiana:

It spells out the symbols and numbers:

Ampersand hash 1 2 5 1 2 semi-colon 3 9

No spaces.

"Smart quotes" and other special characters tend to be a little dicey in HTML anyway, unless you get your page and character encoding matched up properly.

Peace & Luv, Liz

Louisiana Night

Except for the "Ampersand hash", that's what I get(unless that means the same thing as the "and" and "number" sign).

Jeysie

Er, yes. Ampersand is the fancy-shmancy name for the "and" sign, and hash is the fancy-shmancy name for the "number" sign. Sorry. :-[

Peace & Luv, Liz

Yonkey

Quote from: Jeysie on August 13, 2004, 10:36:50 PM
Ampersand hash 1 2 5 1 2 semi-colon 3 9

No spaces.

Exactomundo what I see in IE.  ;P
"A wish changes nothing. A decision changes everything."

Louisiana Night

Quote from: Jeysie on August 13, 2004, 10:43:16 PM
Er, yes. Ampersand is the fancy-shmancy name for the "and" sign, and hash is the fancy-shmancy name for the "number" sign. Sorry. :-[

Peace & Luv, Liz

No need to feel sorry. You've extended my vocabulary.  8)

Storm

Quote from: Jeysie on August 13, 2004, 10:24:57 PMIt looks like the forum software turns apostrophes into their encoded counterparts, and the forum software is showing the 3 from the character code in the search results. Bizarre.

It's probably done to prevent cross-scripting (inserting malicious scripts in forms) :-\
BTW, I had the same problem when I tried writing in Hebrew letters - they all turned into code numbers :-X
"Never argue with idiots. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."

Jeysie

It's not the encoding part I found bizarre (although the encoding script is obviously a little sloppy)... it's the fact that the encoding was included in the search results that I found bizarre. Seems like the search function just brute force searches the raw database stuff, or something like that.

Peace & Luv, Liz