Internet Apostrophe Anomalies

[Pyromaniac605]

I've had some unusual anomalies when viewing some website with apostrophes.

For example this page shows all apostrophes with a "\" before it, in other cases I've also seen lots of other gibberish such as upside down exclamation marks and such.

Any idea why this happens and how to fix it? Also, am I the only one with the problem?

 

[orb]

It isn't your problem, but webpage's. What you see is escapement of characters that could be treated in other way by code, either when they are used by database, PHP or JavaScript, but apostrophe doesn't need to be escaped in HTML, and backslash isn't used to escape characters in HTML. It's a bug on the website.

The example you presented is a forum, so the best way to fix it, is to report a bug on that site, either similarly like on our site (if there is a place to do it and you have an account), or by contacting administrators by using their "Contact Us" form.

I didn't see other glitches you mentioned on the page you linked, so I'm not sure what's the problem with them.

 

[Pyromaniac605]

I wasn't referring to that link, but I have seen other similar issues on different sites.
Anyway, thanks for the help orb.

 

[Moach]

different sites, similar problem!
in website development, these are known as HTML-leaks... which iws basically when the pages source code becomes apparent to the viewers...

it's usually someones mistake :facepalm:

there's nothing wrong with your computer - unless you're using IE, which should be outlawed, i tell ya

 

[Tommy]

It's not uncommon to see unicode in place of punctuation - a box with numbers inside it. This is usually the result of text being copied/pasted from a word processor (such as MS Word). HTML uses a variation on the standard ascii characters, and many word processors use "custom" characters for punctuation. For instance, ascii character set has only one character for "double quotes", while many word processors apps have separate characters for opening and closing doublequotes. When these "custom" characters get pasted into an HTML document, the browser can't interpret them.

You will see this quite often on E-bay product descriptions, or sites that are posting documents originally produced as Word .docs. IIRC, IE can interpret these characters, but not other browsers.

I used to handle E-bay postings for a used car dealer - and he always sent his descritions, etc, as a .doc. For a while, I had to go through and manually replace the "custom" punctuation with standard characters. Then I found a shareware text editor called "Text-Pad", which has a tool called "dosify", which automatically "corrected" the punctuation and things to ascii standard.

 

[Turbinator]

The main reason you have HTML leaks on pages is because pressing Shift + < takes 1 whole second.

So remember, the easiest way to make an annoying web page is to be /font><font color="#00FF00" size="5">lazy.