LQ Posted November 18, 2008 Posted November 18, 2008 (edited) Why was this thread shut? http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=207755 Is there another open proper one? (please feel free to merge) EDIT: apparently here. Anyway the random characters seems to be right after either the short or long description part of certain cache listings. Here is an example of what I just saw on GC1J8QY Bring your own pen with because there is no space in the cache. Also beware not to drop the container!āĜȌౘẳ灳捡湩g␀Ậ ēȋ趸Ɯ⼺眯睷朮潥慣档湩潣⽭敳步振捡敨摟瑥楡獬愮灳㽸灷䜽ㅃ㑅䡋 Additional Hints ( No hints available ) other examples seen on the same page (browsers FF3 & IE7) Bring your own pen with because there is no space in the cache. Also beware not to drop the container! āfɤƐẠẸ㔰㉣ Additional Hints ( No hints available ) --- Bring your own pen with because there is no space in the cache. Also beware not to drop the container! āĜȌౘẳ灳捡湩g␀ẬēȌᰀ婀 Additional Hints ( No hints available ) --- Bring your own pen with because there is no space in the cache. Also beware not to drop the container! Łā Additional Hints ( No hints available ) GCWGXT demonstrates this behavior after the short description part: Yhdet koordinaatit, kaksi kätköä, vain toinen on oikea Just one coordinate, two caches, only the other one is real !ŏȋ앀ƙ⼺眯睷朮潥慣档湩潣⽭敳步振捡敨摟瑥楡獬愮灳㽸畧摩㜽㔱㕡搴ⴳ捡慤㐭㜴ⴲ㐸敡㈭㉡㠱㈰攱戰♣潬㵧♹敤牣灹㵴丣浵楖楳獴倀TſȌᴈ瞿 A Cache on valekätkö The Cache on aito ja alkuperäinen. --- Yhdet koordinaatit, kaksi kätköä, vain toinen on oikea Just one coordinate, two caches, only the other one is real !ĉČᴈ瞿 A Cache on valekätkö The Cache on aito ja alkuperäinen. --- Yhdet koordinaatit, kaksi kätköä, vain toinen on oikea Just one coordinate, two caches, only the other one is real !ǥĔᴈ瞿 A Cache on valekätkö The Cache on aito ja alkuperäinen. --- Yhdet koordinaatit, kaksi kätköä, vain toinen on oikea Just one coordinate, two caches, only the other one is real !ÈȒ䶰Ồ䢘Ơ敎w湥ĀNjȌᴈ瞿 A Cache on valekätkö The Cache on aito ja alkuperäinen. Edited November 19, 2008 by lq
+Harry Dolphin Posted November 19, 2008 Posted November 19, 2008 I saw that on my newest cache. I added a new line <br/> and it seems to have disappeared. Might just be coincidence...
+DeRock & The Psychic Cacher Posted November 19, 2008 Posted November 19, 2008 Obviously the issue hasn't been resolved! Somebody notices it every once and awhile and makes note of it here. I'll Markwell you back to June of this year: Hieroglyphs on pages. Deane AKA: DeRock & the Psychic Cacher - Grattan MI
+colin Posted November 19, 2008 Posted November 19, 2008 Opened a ticket with the Dev team. After reading through both threads I was able to verify two caches that are displaying the characters. GC1J8QY & GCWGXT...any other examples out there?? ~ Colin Faithful Groundspeak Lackey
+awhsom Posted November 19, 2008 Posted November 19, 2008 Opened a ticket with the Dev team. After reading through both threads I was able to verify two caches that are displaying the characters. GC1J8QY & GCWGXT...any other examples out there?? ~ Colin Faithful Groundspeak Lackey GC1GQB3 GC1H2KY
+sTeamTraen Posted November 20, 2008 Posted November 20, 2008 Maybe someone should mail the cache owners to ask them please not to edit their cache pages if they notice these characters, as they are now part of vital research.
+trainlove Posted November 20, 2008 Posted November 20, 2008 Is the 'bug' that's causing this problem also the same one that since June has 'randomly' decided to change some cachers usernames as in this photo?
+J10fly Posted November 20, 2008 Posted November 20, 2008 Is the 'bug' that's causing this problem also the same one that since June has 'randomly' decided to change some cachers usernames as in this photo? The " is just hard coding for the " symbol. Using " instead makes it more compatible with devices. It just looks like the page itself wasn't converting the hard code over to the symbol. Probably just a random glitch. As for the characters I'm gonna guess that they are a language pack issue. Some of them are chinese characters so maybe there is a conversion problem somewhere? Not sure.
+sTeamTraen Posted November 20, 2008 Posted November 20, 2008 (edited) Using " instead makes it more compatible with devices. The &...; notation for punctuation-type characters was IIRC originally meant only so that you could put those characters inside HTML tags without them being interpreted as part of the syntax of the tag. For this you only need five: < for <, > for >; " for ", ' for ', and of course & for the &. Later, someone got the idea that any non-ASCII character should be represented by &something; and things got out of hand. These characters are often misused and there are lots of situations on a Web page where they just don't work. In any case, I think we're safe in assuming that this is not related to the bug in question. As for the characters I'm gonna guess that they are a language pack issue. Some of them are chinese characters so maybe there is a conversion problem somewhere? Not sure. My money is on spurious binary data, either due to a buffer overrun somewhere in the code or perhaps (eek) minor database or disk corrupution. You could imagine it's in the code since the issue always seems to be at the end of the short description, but then maybe that's because it's the table which contains that info which has the corruption. If you set an HTML page up with UTF-8 encoding (which gc.com's pages have) and then throw random binary data at it, there's a very good chance that those characters will map to Chinese glyphs (or those from other East Asian languages which look like Chinese to most of us), simply because such a high proportion of UTF-8 codes are from those languages. Edited November 20, 2008 by sTeamTraen
+DeRock & The Psychic Cacher Posted November 21, 2008 Posted November 21, 2008 My money is on spurious binary data, either due to a buffer overrun somewhere in the code or perhaps (eek) minor database or disk corrupution. You could imagine it's in the code since the issue always seems to be at the end of the short description, but then maybe that's because it's the table which contains that info which has the corruption. If you set an HTML page up with UTF-8 encoding (which gc.com's pages have) and then throw random binary data at it, there's a very good chance that those characters will map to Chinese glyphs (or those from other East Asian languages which look like Chinese to most of us), simply because such a high proportion of UTF-8 codes are from those languages. Your hired! Deane AKA: DeRock & the Psychic Cacher - Grattan MI
Dinoprophet Posted November 21, 2008 Posted November 21, 2008 (edited) I was going to say I've seen this on other pages in the last few weeks, but now I can't swear that it hasn't always been this site. I'll pay more attention now. I was beginning to suspect Firefox, but I see trainlove is using IE. Edit to add: My iGoogle page is doing some of this. Edited November 21, 2008 by Dinoprophet
+Isonzo Karst Posted November 25, 2008 Posted November 25, 2008 GC15PY9 newly published and see this other thread on the subject if you're (colin) looking for other examples
+Novac Posted March 6, 2009 Posted March 6, 2009 I saw that on my newest cache. I added a new line <br/> and it seems to have disappeared. Might just be coincidence... For anyone else who might have this issue: I tried HD's suggestion and added <br /> to the end of my short description. It seems to have made those bad little characters go away.
+xafwodahs Posted March 23, 2009 Posted March 23, 2009 Had same issue on GCXE77 Adding the <br/> at the end of the short description seemed to help.
+xafwodahs Posted March 23, 2009 Posted March 23, 2009 Had same issue on GCXE77 Adding the <br/> at the end of the short description seemed to help.
+bigeddy Posted June 10, 2009 Posted June 10, 2009 My money is on spurious binary data, either due to a buffer overrun somewhere in the code or perhaps (eek) minor database or disk corrupution. You could imagine it's in the code since the issue always seems to be at the end of the short description, but then maybe that's because it's the table which contains that info which has the corruption. I've been seeing the strange characters at the end of the occasional Short Description but didn't think much of it until it happen to one of my pages. Maybe a coincidence but I also noticed that every time I edited the short description a couple of characters were added by the system and the system miscalculated the total number of characters (hidden characters perhaps?). The <br/> trick seems to work, although I don't understand why because I do not use the <br> tag.
+widdi Posted December 6, 2009 Posted December 6, 2009 (edited) new issue http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...3c-c8459f63eb83 we see characters and parts from other listings/useraccounts.. also random I found a workaround (I hope so) in a nother forum - I'll tell it my friend the next few days Edited December 6, 2009 by widdi
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