Naked Science Forum

Non Life Sciences => Geek Speak => Topic started by: DiscoverDave on 21/10/2009 05:45:27

Title: Why does posting software refuse to allow quotes marks at the start of a line?
Post by: DiscoverDave on 21/10/2009 05:45:27
When I post here and on other sites, the software that controls the text area where I type rejects a quote mark at the start of a line and, instead, it "steals" the previous word from the end of the previous line to use at the start of the line apparently to "protect" it from the quote mark.  Why does it do this?  Why does it have this "attitude" against quote marks at the start of a line?
Title: Why does posting software refuse to allow quotes marks at the start of a line?
Post by: LeeE on 21/10/2009 19:28:54
'When I post here...'

Seems to work ok...
Title: Why does posting software refuse to allow quotes marks at the start of a line?
Post by: LeeE on 21/10/2009 19:29:30
"When I post here..."

Also seems ok too...
Title: Why does posting software refuse to allow quotes marks at the start of a line?
Post by: LeeE on 21/10/2009 19:33:07
One possible factor though, is that when you're inserting or updating literal string data in SQL you need to put it in single quotes and this might be upsetting some software as it would lead to a pair of single quotes, equivalent to opening and closing quotes, at the start and end of the string value.

As I don't seem to be getting these problems, at least on this forum, it might just be a browser issue.
Title: Why does posting software refuse to allow quotes marks at the start of a line?
Post by: LeeE on 21/10/2009 19:34:17
`Let's just try back-quote characters to be sure though...`

Nope - they seem ok too.
Title: Why does posting software refuse to allow quotes marks at the start of a line?
Post by: LeeE on 21/10/2009 21:49:35
Yeah, that does look odd, but it looks like word-wrap issue.  What happens if you change the width of your browser window?

It looks as though the length of the first word on the following line is dictating where the previous line is word-wrapped, rather than the length of the last word on that line.  You need to remember that unless you actually type a return (Carriage Return), what you type is held as a single string, with no fixed word-wrap positions.  The software that renders the text and fits it into the available space on the page decides where the word-wrap position should be.

Poor programming/bug is the probable reason.
Title: Why does posting software refuse to allow quotes marks at the start of a line?
Post by: chris on 28/10/2009 08:00:01
It's to stop the first character of the line being a quotation mark. Apparently this is bad sentence feng shui or something.

Chris
Title: Why does posting software refuse to allow quotes marks at the start of a line?
Post by: LeeE on 28/10/2009 19:58:40
But it doesn't stop it Chris, at least not in all cases, e.g. my test posts above.
Title: Why does posting software refuse to allow quotes marks at the start of a line?
Post by: nicephotog on 31/10/2009 23:45:25
(apart your own machines set encoding and locale).
In explorer click on your menu bar View>enconding>
and you will find there are various factors involved in your
software.
1. Browser encoding "for the browser to use".
2. Your keyboard encoding (iso_8850-1 , iso_1252-15 , iso_646 , utf-8 ,
unicode , latin-1) are all extremely similar , but some standard symbols are not
the same, its simply the form and the server will accept-charset .
3. UTF-8 changes some standard characters between HTML-PAGE-LOCALE SETTING under each specific locale and radically e.g. under chinese user-machine-STDINput.
Nastyer again , the database server for a forum site is alike a complete another machine,
Complicating that more the CGI environment of the server may not match the cgi scripts at points in them or their actual encoding and be getting away with it.
The output headers if they are customised
e.g.
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-64
Content-Language: en_UK;