Why does an Apostrophe turn into "'" when restoring a post?

[goku262002]

^^^Question^^^

See I've closed some pages by accident and in an attempt to get my posts back via the auto save feature i get allot of Apostrophes turned into whatever that code is. It looks fine when previewing the post before restoring it.

So what causes that weird Apostrophe bug?

Edited March 12, 2012 by goku262002

[gato]

I can attest this also happens to me, it's a bit of a chore to have to replace all those weird symbols with the apostrophe whenever I use the restore post function.

(I'm using Chrome BTW)

[Velotix von Skruviktorrius]

See I've closed some pages by accident and in an attempt to get my posts back via the auto save feature i get allot of Apostrophes turned into whatever that code is. It looks fine when previewing the post before restoring it.

So what causes that weird Apostrophe bug?

It's amazing how many people work out that it's a code for something but fail to work out that it's the code for the character it's replaced; "'" actually is the code for an apostrophe.

In other words, there is no bug, but it's having to retain the content of your post using a workaround. Without going into a long technical explanation about how forum posts are parsed by an HTML reader, " and ' are both used to mark the start and end of text blocks in pretty much any programming language on the planet, so if they show up uncoded it could cut your post short.

It depends on how they're being read and how clever the reader is. Generally one is picked to be the text block marker so the other can be used freely and I guess for the SSMB the one that plays the role of marker is '.

[Old dead account]

Chrome user. I also get this a lot and also with ampersands Which is this symbol: &

[Velotix von Skruviktorrius]

Again, these are characters used frequently in programming code. & is used to reference pointers, and those are even more of a nightmare to explain to the average user than the text box markers.

The retrieval system isn't smart enough to read in the characters and not tie itself in knots so it replaces the problem characters with placeholders so that the content of your post is actually retained. This isn't something you can really fix, guys. If the reader doesn't replace the problem characters with symbols, it'll at best cut your post off as soon as the first one appears and at worst will break the page code completely. :|

(You'd be surprised how many hoops you have to jump through to get those characters to display in the first place.)

[bmn]

For reasons of security and to avoid page-breaking stuff happening when user input isn't written just right, particular characters are converted into codes called HTML entities. In the case of apostrophes, their entity is ' and draft posts are already in this format when they're saved.

Unfortunately draft posts are considered user input in themselves, and so they also have to be filtered before display. This causes a problem where the ampersand in the HTML entity is itself being turned into an entity - & - breaking the apostrophe entity and giving you ' instead.

IPB uses third-party software for its editor, so solving an issue like this could require work on their part and/or work on the editor's devs' part.

[Diz]

Without going into a long technical explanation about how forum posts are parsed by an HTML reader, " and ' are both used to mark the start and end of text blocks in pretty much any programming language on the planet, so if they show up uncoded it could cut your post short.

I have slowly been moving over to grammatically correct apostrophe and quotation marks, like ’ instead of ' and “ ” instead of " " (« » in my native language), contrary to computer language, which I hope also can fix this problem as I edit my posts more often than crows squawk. Whilst I cannot remember having encountered such errors recently, earlier in time these characters also bugged up my posts, both the original posts and after editing.

If you have Microsoft Office installed, you could probably use Microsoft Word to type topics and posts, and then you could copy-paste the finished content into your web browser as a temporary work-around as it changes the measurement characters into the (likely intended) grammatical characters. Not sure if those characters work well though as I have not tested an edit on them for some time, but worthy a try, I suppose!