can any one tell me what is up with all the random ("ñ")'s scattered in some posts?

[rshields]

I have been seeing this anomoly quite a bit since I joined this forum. I am surprised that others have not noticed it (especially if Arsenic is correct that it is a server side issue). I never worried about it too much because I knew it was somehow related to browsers interpreting special character codes, but since it has now been brought up, I am very curious to understand the problem.

For those that have never seen it, check out the "Guide to DIY Flavoring", one of the stickies in the DIY e-liquid sub-forum (under Tips and Tricks). In the 4th paragraph I see one example of this issue. I am going to paste the offending sentence here, though I am not sure how it will display to others.

[Paste]Credit goes to Scottes, Scubabatdan, Sun Vaporer, Þornbjörg, DVap, Kurt, AlexTM, SysEx, anyone who contributed in any way, and all forum staff.[End Paste]

Interestingly, the whole rest of this post is full of percent symbols which display just fine for me, even though I have many times seen the strange code in other contexts when a percent symbol was clearly supposed to display.

EDIT: I wonder if anyone has paid attention to the age of the offending posts. Is it possible that it is an issue that has been fixed at some point and that is why Arsenic's experiment did not pan out?

 

[Arsenic]

I'm an embedded systems programmer and wrote Chinese and Japanese text entry systems in a past life and an assembler game programmer before that. But yeah I am light on HTML stuff or anything with a 4-letter acronym.

Yeah I was thinking of the % numbers for special chars in a url

Just want to see what jalapeño looks like for me

...

Why does it look fine for me with the n with a ~ on top of it?

What does it look like to others?

(It looks fine for me as well... it's not a user-specific issue, but comes down to what the server feeds us)

*respect!* though, seriously - i have a lot of respect for you professionally.

I can see now where you're coming from, the difference between your "reality" and mine.

I'm a client-side web developer, so i work for the most part with code that is sandboxed within the browser...scripting and DOM (document object model), dealing with various browser-vendor-version specific bugs, implementation differences... (oh the pleasures of interpreted code ), but once in a while some network stuff and serverside architecture, even though it's not exactly my cup of tea

I can appreciate the minimalism and attention to detail of the embeded systems world, as i have the same attitude

I can't stand the sloppiness and bloat that the average Java or .NET programmer comes up with , though i have next to 0 experience with C or assembly

But i don't have to know your stuff and you don't have to know mine, it is fair...

You and i are probably a generation apart, since that i'm only 20.


BTW, the issue you mentioned with latin being misread as garbled asian text, also has a place in the world of web

When ANSI-encoded Cyrilic text (Russian, Ukrainian, etc) gets mis-interpreted as latin-extended (all of the accented vowels, for the most part), you end up with a page full of aeiou with various accents...

This one is a good example: Êðûìñêèé êëóá: ãëîññàðèé è ïåðñîíàëèè/Крымский клуб: глоссарий и персоналии ( www.liter.net/gloss/index2.html )

Maybe the problem we are disecting will get noticed by the ECF staff soon and gets ironed out.

If they are on the lazy side or have too much to do, it won't hurt for them to run an database query for &#****; (asterisk=wildcard), and take out the "amp;" part... that will remove the existing ones....

Anyway, hope you have a good night (or day), - i haven't paid attention to what time zone you're in.

I hope you don't mind too much if i'll PM you with a question


-[Arsenic]

 

[Arsenic]

EDIT: I wonder if anyone has paid attention to the age of the offending posts. Is it possible that it is an issue that has been fixed at some point and that is why Arsenic's experiment did not pan out?

Will check...

I did see some more of these things in the health and wellness forum, so'll dig there when i will have some time... but off to bed for me now.

-[Arsenic]

 

[Arsenic]

Found: a year-old post in health... http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/nicotine/79079-afraid-very-very-afraid-2.html#post1175673

-[Arsenic]

 

[classwife]

This is just something that happened during the site upgrade.....the percentages didn't "take"......

 

[Glam]

I see these pop up on comments all the time, especially when referring to pg vs vg ratios of e juice. I just thought it was some kind of code that forum veterans used and I was too naive to understand. Thanks to the OP for voicing a question that has run through my mind dozens of times. But the thought of a secret code did intrigue me.

 

[Arsenic]

This is just something that happened during the site upgrade.....the percentages didn't "take"......

Great, now we know the exact time period.

The ECF technical staff should then have no problems with getting this fixed if they decide to...

Just a matter of picking the least busy time of day, and building a short script that would prune the database of the extra "amp;".... as in: look for &# and replace them with &#, for the posts made in the month(?) that it took to upgrade

I guess we can consider this "mystery" (and for many it is) solved


-[Arsenic]

 

[Arsenic]

Update:

It's still around if you want to find it...

A new thread in the Suggestions forum.. http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/fo...-its-back-double-encoded-html-entity-bug.html , since i found the issue in MissKitty's post from an hour and half ago.

-[Arsenic]

 

[leenix]

thanks to everyone who responded can't say that i understand most of what was shared but it was an interesting read.