Craig Box's journeys, stories and notes...


Posts Tagged ‘unicode’

Planet NZTech

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

Planet NZTech has received a facelift recently. As well as a new design, seems that the behind-the-scenes stuff has all been fixed, including the last of the unicode problems (I hope Follower wasn't calling me uncultured. I'll get him back by pointing out that his post was syndicated from his blog to Advogato, and from Advogato to the Planet, so appeared twice in a row!)

Other than the layout, the biggest change is the de-emphasising of who wrote what. It's an interesting concept, probably based around the idea of a magazine that has a single focus, and multiple people writing to that focus. In this case, I think people write for their own purposes (I still don't know what mine is, so I should stop doing it) and it's a bit confusing having everything anonymised. Plus, you don't get to have cool heads. But it's not wrong, it's different.

Asshat space (or wordpress c2 a0, for search-fu)

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

Somehow, WordPress is inserting C2 A0 characters in my feed, which means that Planet NZTech can't parse them, so my posts don't show up until I find them manually and fix them.

C2 A0 is a unicode non-breaking space. It could be because of my habit of hitting Space twice after a sentence, that it realiases one of them has to be non-breaking. Whatever it is, it's irritating.

It doesn't happen in the output under ISO-8859-1. It's only on Windows, doing a diff of the feed as downloaded on my UTF-8 Linux server, that I actually see the problem.

Badly configured UTF-8 systems often end up with the symbol A-with-circumflex (Â) before the character. In #wlug, we lovingly call this character "the asshat". I had thought that putting it in would stop this post from being picked up, but seems there's an â in HTML just for my asshat character.

I've also found I can see them with LANG=iso-8859-1 less index.html. This explains why I couldn't find them to start with - less runs in UTF-8 by default, which draws it as a space!

Unfortunately, it works fine on Planet WLUG, so it's fixed in newer planetplanet, which doesn't work for Follower at the moment ?

Not much can really be fixed at this point, so this writeup can act as a "this is the problem" in case anyone Googles for "wordpress c2 a0".