My ellipses are attracting asterisks

I'll venture a guess. Certain characters that fall within unicode but outside the standard set of characters in the text encoding don't transmit properly. Things like accented characters are fine. But things like apple logos and other stuff that will only show if you enter in the unicode escape sequence (it's like a number sandwiched between a & and a #; or something like that). When you go back and edit, too, they all get reset -- meaning even if you did it right the first time, if you edit it it will not display correctly again. My guess would be that the ellipsis dots also fall in that category.

Does it ever *not* happen when you use opt-shift-l?

Hmmm, so it seems to survive at least sometimes. I'm on a PC using firefox at the mo', and I'm not sure how to make ellipsis dots in Windows. But I can try pasting yours in… and see if it works. EDIT: They work for me. And seem to survive edits. Okay, so I have no clue…

I've seen asterisks pop up in a lot of people's posts recently, and I remember someone saying it was a bug with the newest Safari, or something.

She says, being rather vague.

Lau said:

I've seen asterisks pop up in a lot of people's posts recently, and I remember someone saying it was a bug with the newest Safari, or something.

She says, being rather vague.

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Interesting. I haven't noticed it in anyone else's posts, but I use Firefox. I wonder, is it a *display* bug in Safari or a transmit bug in Safari? It seems like it might be the latter....

Of course, some people *use* asterisks. And of course ^2, smutty words get magically transformed into asterisks. But I have not seen individual floating asterisks that seem like they don't belong in Firefox*.

*I put that one in myself.

srobert said:

Hmm…*Now it looks like I can't reproduce the problem either.

(Ellipsis intentional ^_^)

Click to expand...

He says, reproducing the problem.

Edit: Let me see if I can find some of the examples — I don't think they're intentional, they're just single ones chucked in. I keep expecting an exciting footnote and am always disappointed.

Yeah, so wait. I *do* see that one. Did you do that on purpose, or did you just make it happen, you porpoise?

This is something that happens to me quite a bit, actually*– I often get them in the space before an en-dash. It's not something I worry about*– I generally notice straight away and edit the post. I'm certain the odd one does slip through the net now and again – in fact, I sometimes spot them if I'm looking back through some of my previous posts.

I'd always just assumed it was some unicode thing that I was accidentally invoking – it's interesting to see that others are having this problem, though.

EDIT: Ha! I purposefully put a load of en-dashes in my post and look – there are two of the buggers now!

HTML is goofy. Not all 'common' typographical characters are readily available, and some don't come out right when input as the standard character.

Some forum software tries to translate such characters into proper HTML code (for example, to make an ampersand & appear in HTML code, you actually have to type & in the code, as an & by itself is PART of HTML code. < is a "less than" sign < and > is a "greater than" sign >. This forum software translates all that for me, but if you look at the page source, you will see all sorts of goofy things in my post.) Ellipses aren't in HTML code at all. So it all depends on what this forum software does, then how the target's web browser interprets it.

I know that on one forum I frequent, if you type in the HTML code for a symbol, and hit 'preview', then the preview shows the symbol correctly, but then the symbol itself has been put in the text entry box, instead of the code. And if you submit your message with the actual symbol, instead of the HTML code, it won't work. In my case, I was using the 'dagger' symbol, †, whose HTML code is †. When I hit preview, I saw the actual dagger symbol in the 'preview', but I also saw it in my text entry box. When I submitted it, my message contained a question mark instead of a dagger. (This forum appears to support entering the symbol itself, which on a Mac is entered with option-t.)

captain's…log…stardate…316203.89171106037…
There seems…to be…a problem…with…utf8 …encoding…

Spock
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can't
…
reproduce
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it
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(w2k / firefox)

So some see these and others don't?I see them, though I'm using Safari… weird.

Wierdest post of the night or real early morning it's 2.

benthewraith said:

So some see these and others don't?I see them, though I'm using Safari… weird.

Wierdest post of the night or real early morning it's 2.

Click to expand...

You see them specifically because you're using Safari. Safari supports all these fun things. (The asterisks are being inserted by the forum software, they're not an 'artifact' that your browser is inserting.) IE, however, will probably show funny symbols instead of the proper symbols, unless it's a symbol that has a proper HTML code for it.