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Random characters on certain cache listings


LQ

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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 by lq
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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?

 

2e9776b2-c31e-4b81-864e-e4a46604be5b.jpg

 

The &quot is just hard coding for the " symbol. Using &quot 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.

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Using &quot 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 <, &gt 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. :D

 

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 by sTeamTraen
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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. :laughing:

 

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

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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 by Dinoprophet
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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.

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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. :grin:

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.

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