Smart Quotes are Stupid!!!! I said it yea!!!
What I still don’t understand is why this suddenly started happening a few weeks ago. What changed?
‘Straight’ quotes?? That’s homophobic!!
You can c&p from FP posts and the formatting problem shows up.
I still think it’s a windows 10 problem. That’s when it showed up. Some where there’s a server that’s set for a different font.
There is only one website on the Internet that needs to fix Free Republic’s problem with character encoding. That website is freerepublic.com.
While it is good to inform posters of a workaround for the BUG on this site, the real solution is to fix the BUG, not have users jump through hoops to use the website.
I like strange characters.
What’s so “smart” about quotes that can render the text unreadable?
http://blog.luminoso.com/2012/08/20/fix-unicode-mistakes-with-python/
Isolate where the code is jumbling the characters and most of the code has already been written for you to fix it.
What is this...the second or third thread this week on how to fix a stupid problem that shouldn’t be a concern for a website in 2016? Sheesh.
Yeah; I’ve been using the linked site for a few weeks now when posting on FR. It doesn’t “fix” the problem; it’s simply a work-around. The FR web people need to deal with the glitch at that level.
I’ve been using this site, but why did the problem pop up all of a sudden?
I may be totally wrong here, but I am wondering if Jim has tried using a regular closing on the charset meta tag instead of the XHTML version. In other words, instead of the closing tag looking like this /> just using > without the slash?
It might be worth a try.
Please forgive me, Jim, if I am beating a dead horse here.
I use this before posting articles:
http://dan.hersam.com/tools/smart-quotes.html
Only takes a few seconds to copy and paste.
Well, that’s the same site I linked. GMTA.
As of right now, I am going to start leave off the quotes “ and contractions ‘. It takes a long time to “fix” the symbol problems in a long post.
When I went to university, besides getting a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology/Psychological Examining, I got a minor in English and Business Administration and it just irritates me to have mistakes in writing. However, until this symbol thing is fixed, I'm leaving off the symbols that screw up.
Well, I just screwed up making a post. I was going to eliminate those characters, but out of habit I did not. So, my copy of a posters (just left out the ‘ in “poster’s”) comment looks like this:
“They’re not my committee members because I’m not a republican.â€
Habits are hard to change but I will do it.
The truly odd thing is that the issue doesn’t occur on the front page excerpts, only in the actual thread itself. The King of Siam says, “It’s a puzzlement”.
Is FreeRepublic not capable of fixing it? I could fix it for them if they would ask. It’s just a matter - I think - of encoding/decoding characters between database storage and retrieval. I do understand their engine predates PHP which might make it a little more challenging...