Have you ever noticed the odd characters in the left sidebar of the blog, where there are partial quotes from blogs and comments? It looks like swearing, but of course I know it is not. Here are some samples from today, but you will have to check the actual sidebar, because I cannot make them appear on this blog:
Hi all, Let's start with Realtors who are low-balling our unit owners into "giving away" there units
Mike:I'm with you.
It won't tease me,
At first I thought these characters replaced words, but it appears (from this small sampling) they do not, and that they only replace apostrophes or quotation marks, although maybe some other punctuation marks get replaced as well. It would be interesting to notice.
One of these days someone will dream up a really great posting or comment that if quoted in the sidebar will make it look like a heap of swearing was intended. For now, how about the following, which is pretty mild:
What makes life frustrating for UCO? It is sometimes the CV owners' lack of participation.
I would be interested to see what happens to that apostrophe if anyone would like to put the above sentence in the sidebar.
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Hi Lanny,
ReplyDeleteThat is a problem of coding, The sidebar Comment feed is unable to properly convert certain HTML coding to the proper character equivalent.
To get some feeling for this please see the following URL:
http://www.asciitable.com/
It shows the various relative equivalents of ASCII code in Decimal, Hex...Etc.
If you look in column 2 for example you will see the apostrophy character on the decimal 39 line; note that the HTML equivalent is ' which is giving you the impression of swearing; when it is simply the softwares inability to properly convert the HTML to character text.
With this chart in hand you can go ahead and construct some very strange looking strings.
If you had done any programming, you would have recognized this phenomenon immediately.
Hope that is helpful.
Dave Israel
Hi Lanny,
ReplyDeletePS, the reason you cannot make the "swearing" characters appear in the main BLOG, or for that matter in this comment stream is that they both properly convert the HTML slug to it's true plaintext equivalent.
Dave Israel