On 2004.10.01, Janine A Sisk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> According to the client, the double-hyphen character that has been
> causing us trouble is called an Mdash.

Just for correctness, the double-hyphen is called an "em-dash" because
it's the width of an "em" and is supposed to be twice as long as an
"en-dash" which is the width of an "en".  :-)

> They enter these in the product descriptions as &#151; which then
> shows up in the browser as the correct character.
>
> The problem was that when they edit the product descriptions, the text
> in the edit box has a real Mdash instead of the code, and when they
> save this text the Mdash then shows up as a question mark in
> subsequent viewings of the product.

There's a bug in the product description edit page code.  When it
delivers the edit page, it needs to "HTML encode" the values that either
go in the value= attribute of an <input> tag or in the body of the
<textarea> tag.  Those em-dashes should be HTML encoded back into their
entity: &#151; or &#x97; or &mdash; ...

> What finally fixed this, oddly enough, was setting URLCharset to
> iso-8859-1.  I can't imagine why it made a difference - I'm not using
> query variables here, so unless the URLCharset also applies to forms,
> this seems rather odd.

I'm puzzled too -- this shouldn't have "fixed" it.  The right fix is to
HTML encode the content before it gets rendered into the form on the
product description edit page.

Interesting ...


-- Dossy

--
Dossy Shiobara                       mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Panoptic Computer Network             web: http://www.panoptic.com/
  "He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own
    folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)


--
AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/

To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the
body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of 
your email blank.

Reply via email to