' and - replaced with ’

ladybugheart • 18 September 2013 at 9:23 PM

I've noticed that hyphens and apostrophes have occasionally been replaced with weird symbols.

I was looking through the first few posts of one of my roleplays and that weird symbol thing kept popping up. o_o Strangely, the roleplay was posted a few months ago and the punctuation was fine then. I've also seen this on other threads as well, including ones created by other users.

I think it's worth noting that I copied and pasted the text from Microsoft Word, which I believe is the reason for this.

In the past, copying and pasting from Word onto Egg Cave has had varying results. At first, apostrophes and hyphens were replaced with question marks; later, they disappeared altogether. In June, I noticed that this had been fixed, but it looks like the problem has returned.

I'm using Safari, but this appears on Firefox as well.

Apostrophe and hyphen typed on Egg Cave: ' -

Apostrophe and hyphen typed on Word: ‘ -

The two hyphens look the same, while the apostrophes look slightly different. I'm guessing that Egg Cave doesn't recognize the symbols due to this. However, it seemed to recognize them perfectly fine back in June.

I'm hoping this problem can be fixed; I don't really want to go back and edit all my posts. ^^"

Edit:

It appears that this isn't happening only for hyphens and apostrophes, but other symbols as well.

' = ’
- = –
" = “
... = …

Here's an example of what it looks like, taken from a roleplay; when I posted this, the punctuation was fine.

That’s open for interpretation.
Seer – Seers see and know their aspect.
...giving you some sort of “title†and a “planet.â€
Your land, your title…

karamel • 22 September 2013 at 10:59 AM

@ladybugheart Yeah, @frosted's overall site suggestions are (or, rather, /were/) using bullet points that I think were copied from Microsoft Word.

I'm sure you've noticed the difference between typing it in Egg Cave and Word, so I think it's safe to say that we can assume EC doesn't recognise the characters. Something to do with the huge overhaul of the forum, I think; the bullet points worked fine in frosted's topic before then (not sure about copying from Word because I've never needed to do that).

I think we just have to sit it out and wait for Ian to come along. x3

As a substitute, if you're insistant on typing on Word for RPing (because of grammar checking or whatever), you can always type it on EC and then paste it in Word and then change all the mistakes on EC. 😉

Zac • 4 October 2013 at 2:11 PM

@ladybugheart When the forums were redone, some of the ways that we "clean" user input were updated, and as you might've noticed, not all of the same characters are allowed any more. This is more a security thing than anything else as those unconventional characters are often used to maliciously insert code into websites.

As @karamel mentioned, copying from Word sometimes introduces the weird character transformations since text on Egg Cave has a different encoding. I'd recommend using a simple text editor like Notepad to type out replies ahead of time.

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