If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
|
Thread Tools | Rate Thread | Display Modes |
#16
|
|||
|
|||
Strange characters
On 1/23/2019 10:04 AM, swalker wrote:
Look at this neat� nine lives minus 1. I know the guy who replied to the email didn't do this and it appears on all his replies regardless of the subject. What he wrote was "neat nine lives minus 1" in a reply to a link to a headline I sent about a cat going over a dam and being rescued. What's up? this is senseless --- What are you trying to say? |
Ads |
#17
|
|||
|
|||
Strange characters
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote
| I'm quite aware of what a non-breaking space does. However, I retain my | assertion than an nbsp _followed by an ordinary space_ serves little | purpose : it will not stop the line being broken at that point. I suppose | if the gap so produced is _not_ at the end of a line, it _does_ force a | double space which might otherwise have been rendered as a single one, | but it does seem a backhanded way of achieving that. (A double nbsp - | with no ordinary space - would have that effect and also prevent the | line being broken at that point, if that's important.) Lucky for the rest of us that you don't write the laws. I use them a lot, when I want more space between things. I also use them for indents. I don't like the newish fashion of having no indents for paragraphs. And I use them for things like table of contents, to indent a list under another item. It's not about line returns. It's about formatting. A double nbsp *is* the same thing. I don't know whether the software in question would treat it the same. It might just render it literally. The point being that the problem is with the software, not the usage. &#x; is valid HTML where xx is a character code. Some sites even use it to hide things, such as using &#x; to spell out an email address so bots won't see it. If the software in question wer going to convert copied HTML to UTF-8 then it should process it properly and not just assume the source is UTF-8. But in their defense it does get complicated. There is no required marker to denote UTF-8 or any other encoding in files (except maybe unicode-16). much less copied snippets. So the only way to check is to "sniff" it. In other words, invalid UTF-8 should be an indicator that the text needs to be processed as something else, not an indicator that someone deliberately wrote invalid UTF-8! That would be like assuming everything is English and converting the Spanish si to ?? to show that si is not an English word. |
#18
|
|||
|
|||
Strange characters
In message , Mayayana
writes: "J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote | I'm quite aware of what a non-breaking space does. However, I retain my | assertion than an nbsp _followed by an ordinary space_ serves little | purpose : it will not stop the line being broken at that point. I suppose | if the gap so produced is _not_ at the end of a line, it _does_ force a | double space which might otherwise have been rendered as a single one, | but it does seem a backhanded way of achieving that. (A double nbsp - | with no ordinary space - would have that effect and also prevent the | line being broken at that point, if that's important.) Lucky for the rest of us that you don't write the laws. Nor you (-: I use them a lot, when I want more space between things. Reasonable, _in HTML_ (or anything else that recognises NBSPs in whatever form). In plain-text emails/posts, less so. I also use them for indents. I don't like the newish fashion of having no indents for paragraphs. And I use them for (I used to rebel against it too, using three spaces - or a tab - instead. However, I think blank lines between paragraphs instead has become the norm.) things like table of contents, to indent a list under another item. It's not about line returns. It's about formatting. A double nbsp *is* the same thing. I don't know whether As what? Using "x" to denote an nbsp, " ax b " is _not_ the same as " axxb " in HTML; the former will break if it comes out as being where a line break would be ("a" on the end of one line, "b" on the next), the latter will be moved to the next line. If you're forcing the formatting such that you know it _isn't_ at the end of a line, that's breaking the intention of HTML (use e. g. a .pdf). the software in question would treat it the same. It might just render it literally. The point being that the problem is with the software, not the usage. &#x; is valid HTML where xx Agreed. is a character code. Some sites even use it to hide things, such as using &#x; to spell out an email address so bots won't see it. A good use. If the software in question wer going to convert copied HTML to UTF-8 then it should process it properly and not just assume the source is UTF-8. But in their defense it does get complicated. There is no required marker to denote UTF-8 or any other encoding in files (except maybe unicode-16). much less copied snippets. So the only way to check is to "sniff" it. In other words, invalid UTF-8 should be an indicator that the text needs to be processed as something else, not an indicator that someone deliberately wrote invalid UTF-8! That would be like assuming everything is English and converting the Spanish si to ?? to show that si is not an English word. Agreed. The problem is that the person _originating_ the message probably doesn't know there's anything amiss, as nothing wrong is visible to him/her. -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf Wisdom is the ability to cope. - the late (AB of C) Michael Ramsey, quoted by Stephen Fry (RT 24-30 August 2013) |
#19
|
|||
|
|||
Strange characters
In message , Mathedman
writes: On 1/23/2019 10:04 AM, swalker wrote: Look at this neat� nine lives minus 1. I know the guy who replied to the email didn't do this and it appears on all his replies regardless of the subject. What he wrote was "neat nine lives minus 1" in a reply to a link to a headline I sent about a cat going over a dam and being rescued. What's up? this is senseless --- What are you trying to say? I presume you've missed most of the posts in the thread, which have deduced that the first character between the words in "neat nine" (note the apparent double space) wasn't an ordinary space. (I doubt swalker is still with us, but if you are, it'd be interesting to know whether your correspondent intended the character to be a space of some sort, or something else, such as a colon, or even a smiley.) -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf Wisdom is the ability to cope. - the late (AB of C) Michael Ramsey, quoted by Stephen Fry (RT 24-30 August 2013) |
#20
|
|||
|
|||
Strange characters
On 1/23/19 11:55 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , swalker writes: Look at this neat� nine lives minus 1. [snip] Note the double space after "neat". In Thunderbird, I see three characters between 'neat' and a single space. The first is an 'i' with 2 dots over it. The second is an upside-down question mark. The third is 1/2 (as 1 character). [snip] -- Mark Lloyd http://notstupid.us/ "Church teachings are but fiction. I have knowledge of their inanity." -- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) |
#21
|
|||
|
|||
Strange characters
In message , Mark Lloyd
writes: On 1/23/19 11:55 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: In message , swalker writes: Look at this neat� nine lives minus 1. [snip] Note the double space after "neat". In Thunderbird, I see three characters between 'neat' and a single space. The first is an 'i' with 2 dots over it. The second is an upside-down question mark. The third is 1/2 (as 1 character). [snip] Too much snipping. The post I was replying to included this text: --- neat� nine lives minus 1. I know the guy who replied to the email didn't do this and it appears on all his replies regardless of the subject. What he wrote was "neat nine lives minus 1" in a reply to a link to --- The first line, when I saw it in Turnpike (and again in the snippet I've posted above), contains what you see: i with diæresis, inverted question mark, and half. The second line - the one beginning "What he wrote" - just contains a double space. I am assuming the OP manually typed the second extract (of what he thinks his correspondent "wrote"). -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf By the very definition of "news," we hear very little about the dominant threats to our lives, and the most about the rarest, including terror. "LibertyMcG" alias Brian P. McGlinchey, 2013-7-23 |
#22
|
|||
|
|||
Strange characters
On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 19:01:03 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote: In message , Mathedman writes: On 1/23/2019 10:04 AM, swalker wrote: Look at this neat� nine lives minus 1. I know the guy who replied to the email didn't do this and it appears on all his replies regardless of the subject. What he wrote was "neat nine lives minus 1" in a reply to a link to a headline I sent about a cat going over a dam and being rescued. What's up? this is senseless --- What are you trying to say? Who me? I was curious as to why this happened. Google about the cat if you want the whole story. I presume you've missed most of the posts in the thread, which have deduced that the first character between the words in "neat nine" (note the apparent double space) wasn't an ordinary space. (I doubt swalker is still with us, but if you are, it'd be interesting to know whether your correspondent intended the character to be a space of some sort, or something else, such as a colon, or even a smiley.) When I askd him about it he didn't have a clue and I can be sure he didn't intentionally do anything that make this senseless string appear. |
#23
|
|||
|
|||
Strange characters
"swalker" wrote
| Who me? I was curious as to why this happened. Google about the cat if | you want the whole story. | Ignore mathedman. He seems to only post to complain. Often it's arguing with anti-social posters. In your case it seems to be just arbitrary. I suspect he's elderly and only partially aware of what he's doing. |
#24
|
|||
|
|||
Strange characters
In message , swalker
writes: On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 19:01:03 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote: [] I presume you've missed most of the posts in the thread, which have deduced that the first character between the words in "neat nine" (note the apparent double space) wasn't an ordinary space. (I doubt swalker is still with us, but if you are, it'd be interesting to know whether your correspondent intended the character to be a space of some sort, or something else, such as a colon, or even a smiley.) When I askd him about it he didn't have a clue and I can be sure he didn't intentionally do anything that make this senseless string appear. Thanks for coming back! So, I presume he just intended a space (or double space), and did a copy-and-paste from something like Word (?), and his emailing software didn't warn him. (Or he was using emailing software that uses non-ASCII directly - and, in this case, pointlessly - without inserting the relevant encoding.) -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf Whoever decided to limit tagline length to 68 characters can kiss my |
|
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | Rate This Thread |
|
|