Sorting out special characters in older posts

[whole diary]

[JayMac]

I note a few spurious characters appeared in a post on the Fare's Fair board yesterday when the pound sign was used. I'm wondering if any ongoing issue will be from posts tgat come from mobile devices. Testing...

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http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=16592.0

[grahame]

From this morning:

Another of those occasions this morning - fixed.   Any posts from 10:18 to about 10:40 may need to be re-submitted - sorry about that.   A couple of strange character have crept back in, but I can fix them next time and they won't overwhelm us again.

I need to run restores through my filter script in future ...

[Adelante_CCT]

Whether it's of any use or not but my post from that thread was posted using a laptop.

I note a few spurious characters appeared in a post on the Fare's Fair board yesterday when the pound sign was used. I'm wondering if any ongoing issue will be from posts tgat come from mobile devices.

[grahame]

Whether it's of any use or not but my post from that thread was posted using a laptop.

I note a few spurious characters appeared in a post on the Fare's Fair board yesterday when the pound sign was used. I'm wondering if any ongoing issue will be from posts tgat come from mobile devices.

I know exactly what the issue is ... just rushed it back up this morning when the database got corrupted without going through the extra filter.  However - thanks for the clues ... 90% of the time such clues are pure gold.

In my defence for the error, the orange juicer has just failed, there was water pouring through the ceiling at reception and setting the fire alarms off ... then the database issue.  Things go in threes, so it got easier thereafter.

[Chris from Nailsea]

My personal view is that you should have instructed the excellent Phil to deal with the first two of those issues (after all, he doesn't do much else all day ), and deal with the third yourself. 


Only joking, Phil. 

[grahame]

Ah - I took on Christmas and others have the pleasure of the New Year, which I am rapidly selling to make it far busier than Christmas was 

[Chris from Nailsea]

In which case, Phil, please accept my abject apologies: that orange juicer at WellHouse has phased me, more than once. 

[stuving]

You may have seen stories today about a French spelling reform, promising "the end of the circumflex" or the like. Well, don't get your hopes up - it's much more limited, and confusing, than that. And they are adding a load of accents too, notable grave ones (some replacing acute with no change in pronunciation).

In any case the change is introduced first in schools, and is optional for those who are old enough to have learnt the old rules (even if they didn't). So it may be some time before it is visible - presumably first on line, where news items are (and may still be in twenty years time) cobbled together by kids.

What I suspect may be most noticeable to us is the change in the rules for "immigrant" words, a lot of which of course come from English. In general these will become single words (no hyphen), and will pluralise with an added -s (usually silent) whatever happens in in the source language. Thus week-end becomes weekend, jazzmen becomes jazzmans, (matches is already matchs) and lieder becomes lieds.

Incidentally, grahame reported in another thread:

Sorry about the 10 minute outage - just back.    You may find special characters "breeding" again - don't worry; I'll take them out next time. I only realised once I'd taken the database down that the trick code was ... there in the database!

What exactly is that "trick code"? Is it what's  needed to trap the sequences to be removed, or is it the code that produced them (either during read or write of backups) in the first place? Or something else altogether?

[froggycat]

You may have seen stories today about a French spelling reform, promising "the end of the circumflex" or the like. Well, don't get your hopes up - it's much more limited, and confusing, than that. And they are adding a load of accents too, notable grave ones (some replacing acute with no change in pronunciation).

In any case the change is introduced first in schools, and is optional for those who are old enough to have learnt the old rules (even if they didn't). So it may be some time before it is visible - presumably first on line, where news items are (and may still be in twenty years time) cobbled together by kids.

As a French expat, in love with both my native language and the language of this beautiful island, I was horrified about this reform of the language. And all because poor darlings at school need to be spared learning anything a bit too challenging.
And simplifying the spelling at a time when spell checkers and other such validating tools are getting better and better sounds ludicrous.
Let's just hope English does not go down the same root and remains the amazing, complex language that it is! And at least you don't have to worry about too many special characters 

[trainer]

And all because poor darlings at school need to be spared learning anything a bit too challenging.
...
Let's just hope English does not go down the same root ...

It already has...it's called American English. 

[Chris from Nailsea]

Let's just hope English does not go down the same root ...

It already has...it's called American English. 

That doesn't make it right. 

[grahame]

Database was out for a few minutes ... I have re-run the naughty character cleanup script as they were starting to breed again in one or two places.   Should be OK now.  Anticipate this cleanup every six months or so.