Strange type in the Lates Posts ?

[JohnFParticipant @johnf59703]

Anyone noticed the strange type appearing in the RHS Latest Posts column ?

The actual title appear correct but see the examples pasted below of the latest post column

New Chuck won’t screw on

Centre Drill Leaves a “Pipâ€? – Sometimes

John

[JohnFParticipant @johnf59703]

[SteviegtrParticipant @steviegtr]

Looks fine on my P.C

[martinjpayne1964Participant @martinjpayne1964]

Yeah, seeing it on my Mac… both using Safari and Opera browsers.

[Paul LousickParticipant @paullousick59116]

Same on my PC. Windows 7, Firefox

[Anonymous]

It's reminiscent of something that can't properly display the UTF-8 character set.

[Paul LousickParticipant @paullousick59116]

When you open the posts and look at the titles, they contain apostrophes and inverted commas. You may need the correct character set on your comuter to display them. OK for some but not all. Probably should not use punctuation marks and special characters when naming a post.

New Chuck won’t screw on

Centre Drill Leaves a “Pip” – Sometimes

Edited By Paul Lousick on 25/07/2021 05:35:27

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

It's been like that for as long as I can remember, something in that column does not show punctuation, etc.

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi, I agree with JasonB that this has happened many many times for as long as I can remember. It's probably more noticeable when there are two or more in the list at the same time.

Regards Nick.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Dave [SOD] explained it, not long ago

… If I recall correctly, it’s related to the use of ‘curly quote marks‘

MichaelG.

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Not just quote, I've just added a pound symbol to the end of the thread title which comes up as a question mark.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by JasonB on 25/07/2021 08:35:53:

Not just quote, I've just added a pound symbol to the end of the thread title which comes up as a question mark.

That's right. Michael's example was caused by his mac inserting fancy quote marks, but the underlying issue is the forum not supporting Unicode fully, in particular – for reasons unknown – titles in 'Last Forum Posts' misinterpret Unicode characters.

In the good old days, when life was soooo simples, computers (mostly), used ASCII characters. ASCII supports US English characters, digits and punctuation with a straightforward 7 bit binary code. ASCII is OK for English speakers, though it caused trouble in the UK with # and £, but unhelpful for any language with accents, and hopeless for non-Latin alphabets like Greek, Hebrew or Chinese. In French là and la are different words.

Modern computers use Unicode rather than ASCII. Unicode can use 8 or more bits to represent characters. Unicode allows us to type non-ASCII symbols such as ° ± ² ´ µ ¶ · ¸ and ¹ plus other alphabets שׁ

On an engineering forum it's handy to type mathematical symbols like ∴ and fractions such as ⁷⁄₃₂. Special characters can be looked up by searching for Unicode plus minus, how the magic numbers are typed in varies by operating system, but they all allow cut and paste of the actual characters. I use this nice website for generating fractions.

As Unicode is almost universal these days, many software packages use it automatically, and correct single quotes from 'hello' to ‘hello’, and in other ways. The cost is added complexity, and a risk the software will get characters wrong. This forum seems to get Unicode right apart from in Last Forum Posts, where complex Unicode characters are in titles are misinterpreted. Probably a bug. Best to avoid anything other than plain text in titles. As far as I can tell Unicode works correctly everywhere else on the forum.

Dave

[Rod RenshawParticipant @rodrenshaw28584]

I had noticed it and thought vaguely that the orginal poster must have started to use a naughty word and then decided to censor it to spare everyone's blushes.

[JohnFParticipant @johnf59703]

Thank you one and all ! I have been otherwise engaged since my original post but at least its now explained — I'll live with it !!

Regards John

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