Diamonds with question marks - encoding

I'm getting these little diamonds with question marks in them in my HTML attributes when I present data from my database. I'm using EPiServer and a few custom properties.
This is the information I've gathered,
I save my data as a XML document, since I use custom EPiServer properties which need more than one defined value. This is saved as UTF8.
It's only attributes in element tags which have this problem, such as align=left becomes align=�left�. There is no " character there, but I get the diamonds anyway.
If I use " outside an element, it works and shows correctly.
Any clues?

This is a problem with your character encoding scheme.
I would recommend reading this article, where (close to the bottom of it), he shows you why you get that little diamond with question marks.

Has the XML been touched by any of the Microsoft Office suite products.
These are notorius for switching vanilla quotes (") x'22' to smartquotes x'93' and x'94'(“”).
Also singlequote (') is often converted from x'27' to x'91' and x'92' pairs (‘’).

Related

Is it possible to ignore paragraph marks when using getTextRanges() in word add in?

I am currently developing a word addin using the office js library. I need to get all sentences in the word document as individual ranges. For this I used getTextRanges() on the body of the document with "." as the delimiter. However, it also separates on paragraph mark which is not ideal for my use case. All I want is for the document to be divvied up into ranges where the only delimiter is "." - regardless of whether the ranges will then expand across paragraphs.
Is there a way to ignore paragraph marks with getTextRanges(), or is there another method entirely that I seem to have overlooked?
Thanks.
I have been unable to resolve it.

Correct syntax for newline in Github Bio

Here is an example on my github profile - https://github.com/jack17529
I want to change this -
Silver Bullet in Issue KILLING.____
Master Mind to create Issues.______
My strongest language is Python not English.
I want to have newline instead of blanks.
like this -
Silver Bullet in Issue KILLING.
Master Mind to create Issues.
My strongest language is Python not English.
I have checked Bitbucket Bio is nowhere related to Github Bio.
Maybe they don't allow us to do it via the normal way, But It is possible to do of course. We can use the auto newline rule for the words which are too long for appending to the current line, for our need. All we need to do is putting other Unicode Spaces instead of normal space. And normal space between lines, for using newline rule against forbidden newline rule.
And if you want a free line, because of the character limitations, you can use the longer one;
" " instead of " "      (Try selecting spaces between quotes with your mouse)
Also this trick allows me create unnecessary spaces in the Stack Overflow too, like above, in the quote box.
Here is the result: github.com/cosmicog:
I have tried other answers, html ways, but no, they handle html tricks of course.
Note: This causes a bad look in the list view and the profile overview tooltip:
Maybe that is why it is not allowed but I hope they will fix this in the future.
As told to me by github support there is no way !, see here -
According to Github Support
I just did it by simply copying and pasting the character corresponding to this codepoint | unicode-table.com | as many time as needed in order to align the text the way I wanted.
This is the procedure I followed: at the end of each line I pressed Enter, then I filled the new line with 7 instances of the character mentioned above; then I pressed Enter again and started the new line with its text.
This question is a little stale, but I found it before I solved this myself, so I thought I'd drop my solution.
The bio doesn't appear to honor markdown, but neither does it accept HTML entities or elements. I worked around this with non-breaking characters to create long "words" similar to how you've used "_".
You can see in my bio that I needed a " " and a "‑" to format mine. The long word will pop to the next line. If you have a real short line, you can extend it with a lot of non-breaking spaces, but this probably isn't necessary. Since you cannot enter " " you need to use copy/paste or ALT codes (not looked up, but someone might add these for you). Those are the real characters above, so you can take them from this answer.
Refer: How to create newline in Github Bio
Just use   in HTML editor mode to new line is OK, This is my GitHub Bio

How can I use the DocX library to change the font globally, remove superfluous spaces, and remove or add extra line breaks?

I want to, using the DocX library [https://docx.codeplex.com/], convert a .docx document to use a different font. Does anybody know how to do that? The samples projects are very spare, and the documentation is nonexistent.
I find, too, that often there are extraneous spaces in documents, and I want to iterate over all these until there are never two contiguous spaces. I can do this in a loop, I guess, replacing " " (2 spaces) with " " (1 space) until " " (2 spaces) is no longer found.
However, I also want to remove superfluous line breaks that sometimes occur when copying-and-pasting text into a document. I can do it "manually" (in Libre Office, not sure how it's done in MS Word), as I got an answer to this question:
(select "Regular Expressions" and then replace "$" (without the quotes) with a space)
...but how programmatically, with DocX?
Additionally, in some cases I want to ADD line breaks/"paragraph returns" where there are legitimate line breaks between the end of one paragraph and the start of another, but no extra line to separate them visually. According to this:
...I can add a paragraph/line break to a legitimate line break by searching for "$" and replacing that with "\n\n"
This does work, too (manually, in Libre Office); but again...how to do this with the DocX library?
It appears that not all of this is possible with the current version of the DocX library you are using. If it is not exposed in documentation, the functions might as well not exist, and you should not be using undocumented features.
There is a much more mature library available, however, called the "Open XML SDK", that can do everything you need.
The correct way to change a font, regardless of whether you are doing it with the document editor, or you are writing a program to manipulate these files, is to change the appropriate text's style attribute, or changing the definition of style in use.
You should never, ever, ever, ever directly change the font of any text. Personally, I think that the 'font type' and 'font size' menus should be removed entirely from word/libreoffice/etc, and only be accessible inside a 'change style properties' dialog; the only reason to directly apply a font is if you are actually providing an example of particular typeface under discussion!
See How to: Replace the styles parts in a word processing document (Open XML SDK) from the MSDN documentation for a description of the way that works.
To search and replace text, the applicable MSDN page is How to: Search and replace text in a document part (Open XML SDK). For specifically replacing multiple spaces with a single space, there are numerous results on Google that should all work to at least some degree.

JMeter CSV Data Set is corrupting Japanese strings stored as proper UTF-8, I get Question Marks instead

I read in search terms from a simple text file to send to a search engine.
It works fine in English, but gives me ???? for any Japanese text.
Text with mixed English and Japanese does show the English text, so I know it's reading it.
What I'm seeing:
Input text:
Snow Leopard をインストールする場合、新しい
Turns into:
Snow Leopard ???????????????
This is in my POST field of an HTTP.
If I set JMeter to encode the data, it just puts in the percent sequence for question marks.
About the Data:
The CSV file is very simple in
structure.
There's only one field / one column,
which I name TERM, and later use as
${TERM}
I don't really need full CSV because it's only one string per line.
There's no commas or quotes.
It's UTF-8 and when I run the Unix "file" command on the file, it says UTF-8 text.
I've also verified UTF-8 in command line and graphical mode on two machines.
Interesting note:
An interesting coincidence that I noticed: if there are 15 Japanese characters then I get 15 question marks, so at some point it's being seen as full characters and not just bytes.
JMeter CSV Dataset Config:
Filename: japanese-searches.csv
File encoding: UTF-8 (also tried without)
Variable names: TERM
Delimiter: ,
Allow Quoted Data: False (I also tried True, different, but still wrong)
Recycle at EOF: True
Stop at EOF: False
Staring mode: All threads
A few things I've tried:
- Tried Allow quoted Data. It changed to other strange characters.
- Added -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
- Tried encoding the POST stage, but it just turned into a bunch of %nn for question marks
And I'm not sure how "debug" just after the each line of the CSV is read in. I think it's corrupted right away, but I'm not sure.
If it's only mangled when I reference it, then instead of ${TERM} perhaps there's some other "to bytes" function call. I'll start checking into that. I haven't done anything with the JMeter functions yet.
Edited Dec 24:
Tweaks:
Changed formatting and added bullet
points for more clarity.
Clarified that the file is UTF-8, and have verified that.
A new theory:
Is it possible that the Japanese characters are making it through, and the issue is that EVERY SINGLE place that shows them maps them to a "?" at DISPLAY TIME only. So even though I've checked in a bunch of places, they all have a display issue just in the UI?
Is there a way in JMeter to see the numeric value of a character or string? Actually, to tell JMeter to display the list of Unicode code points?
I'll look at my last log files... although I suppose even the server logs could mis-mapped the characters.
Also, perhaps when doing variable expansion inside of the text field that I POST, where I reference the ${TERM}, maybe at that point it also maps to question marks, but that the corruption happens at that later point. If that happened, AND it was mis-displayed in the UI, then it might lead to a false conclusion.
What I'd really like to do is pause JMeter after the first CSV record, just after that line is loaded, and look at it with a "data scope" or byte editor or something. Not sure if this is possible.
Found the issue, there was another place the UTF-8 had to be specified.
In the HTTP Request, to the right of the Method, you have to also set Content Encoding to UTF-8
Yes, in hindsight, this seems obvious, but there were a number of reasons I didn't think this was needed. Some of my incorrect assumptions might be helpful for others who are debugging, so here goes - I would have thought that:
1: Once text has made it into Java as Unicode, it stays as Unicode, and goes in and out by UTF-8. Obviously not in this case.
2: I sort of thought HTTP defaulted to UTF-8 unless you say otherwise, but maybe I'm just used to XML, but probably not a good practice to assume that, and maybe HTTP defaults to ISO-Latin1 or something, or even if there's a spec, maybe folks don't follow it.
3: And if I don't specific it, I'd think the "do no harm" approach would be to pass the characters on, and let the receiver on the other end deal with it. Wrong again!
(OK, so points 1, 2 and 3 overlap a bit)
4: Even though my HTTP Request POST, I did still try the Encode checkbox. I certainly thought that would have encoded it, but all I got was the repeating % hex for question marks, so seemed to me that the data was already corrupted at that point. Wrong again. I suspect WITHIN the HTTP phase, there's TWO character transitions, first from Unicode to whatever encoding it thinks you have, and THEN a second encoding into the %signs, and my data was mis-encoded at the first step.
5: And I would have thought JMeter would say something or warn, but from my reading, apparently it's not helpful in that respect. You can do logging or whatever.
And the "?" is Java's way of reporting a problem BY default, this started in the Java 1.4x timeframe. In my Java code I prefer to set encoding errors to report as an exception, but again, not the default, and not what JMeter does.
So I learned my lesson.
The HINT that the Unicode was at least starting out OK was that the number of question marks equaled the number of Japanese characters, instead of having 2 or 3 times as many question marks. If the length of "???" matches your Japanese (or Chinese) string, then Java DID see actual Unicode characters at some point along the journey. Whereas if you see 3 times as many ?'s as input text, then Java always saw them as bytes or ints or whatever, and NEVER as valid codepoints.
Came across this topic when searching for solution to use parameters from csv file that contained some columns written in Hebrew.
I used Excel 2007 to create a 1000 lines data for user registrations. The first and the last names had to be in Hebrew.
I exported the file to "Unicode text" file. It became tab delimited.
"Unicode Text" saves in UTF-16 LE (Little Endian), not in UTF-8. That is important.
I opened the result in Notepad++. I could see the Hebrew letters properly. The Notepad++ has the "Encoding" menu item, where you can check the encoding or change it. So I changed the Little Endian to UTF-8.
Then I replaced tabs with commas (just selected the tab and pasted it into the Find box.
The parameters were substituted ok, but after running the script I saw the following:
In the "View Results Tree" listener I opened the "Result" tab of the "Http Request".
The parameters were substituted, but the HTTP view tab (on the bottom) of the Request showed me some gibberish.
But when I looked at the Raw view, I saw that the request parameters actually contained strings like %D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%98%D7%94 that when taken in pairs (%D7 %A9) corersponded properly to Hebrew letters.
To my mind, the JMeter has a bug and can not properly display the unicode chars. But it sends (POSTs) them out ok.
Hope I am right and hope it will help someone.
You can try to use "SHIFT-JIS" in Content encoding (it's nearby Method selection). Then you should uncheck "Encode?" for parameter that included Japanese.
Hope it works you.

Apostrophe issue in RTF

I have a function within a custom CRM web application (old VB.Net circa 2003) that takes a set of fields from a database and merges them with palceholders in a set of RTF based template documents. These generate merged letters and documentation. The code essentially loops through each line of the RTF template file and replaces any instances of the placeholder values with text from a database record. The issue I'm having is that users have pasted a certain type of apostrophe into the web app (and therefore into the database) that is not rendering correctly in the resulting RTF file. It is rendering like this - ’.
I need a way to spot this invalid apostrophe in the code and replace it with a valid one. Unfortunately when I paste the invalid apostrophe into the Visual Studio editor it gets converted into the correct one. So I need another way to express this invalid apostrophe's value. Unfortunately I do not know a great deal about unicode and other encodings so I'm calling out for help with this.
Any ideas?
If you really just want to figure out what the character is you might want to try and paste it into a text editor like ultraedit. It has a hex mode that you can flip to to see the actual underlying bytes.
In order to do the replace once you've figured out the character you'd do something like this in Vb,
text.Replace(ChrW(2001), "'")
Note that you might not be able to figure it out easily using the text editor because it might also get mangled by paste from the clipboard. You might want to either print some debug of the ascii values from code. You can use the AscW function to do that.
I can't help but think that it may actually simply be a case of specifying the correct encoding to use when you write out the stream though. Assuming you're using a StreamWriter you can specify it on the constructor. I'm guessing you actually want ASCII given your requirement.
oWriter = New System.IO.StreamWriter(path, False, System.Text.Encoding.ASCII)
It looks like you probably want to encode characters out of the 8 bit range (>255).
You can do that using \uNNNN according to the wikipedia article.