What made many of the coding websites converting standard " into non standard ”? - encoding

This question is about standard double quote " and non-standard double quote “ & ”
Yesterday when I searched for some sample facebook serverfbml codes, and came upon to this
http://mahmudahsan.wordpress.com/2008/11/22/facebook-fbml-rendering-in-iframe-application/
okay so it has got what I want, so I copied the code to my project and run it... bah... lots of errors
Why? Because the site turned the standard double quote " inside his script into “ or ” ,
or single quote from ' into ’
This is not the first time I faced this problem when copying codes from the Internet, and I believe many of the code writers haven't expected that the site turned their single/double quotes into strange ones.
Any explanation to this strange phenomenon ?
edited: I notice the title converted my " into “ & ” too... let me edit it... oh and I failed

At least in the title or in the text, it looks much better to have typographic double quotes (i.e. is more pleasant to the eye). Coding sites should not do this for actual code, i.e. in StackOverflow code that is indented by four spaces. If a double quote in text is converted to typographic, it's fine.
This gets really worse when you paste typographic quotes into a console that tries to display the character and falls back to a standard quote, because the console font does not have a typographic quote. Because then it looks like it's a standard one, but it isn't. Not much you can do about it, other than use a code display plugin on your website that does not change code.

The problem is in the underlying blog engine. Wordpress does that by default, and there is AFAIK no way to turn it off (Without changing the code). Given the fact that there are only relatively few really great blog engines, there may not always be a choice to switch to something "better".
Also in the same category: Fancy dashes, aka. turning - into –

the source shows that the quote char is sometimes ”
that's the quote that is the good looking quote which will cause problem in a program.
i think either the WordPress text editor or storage/retrieval converted the ordinary quote into that one.
You can use the replace function in your program editor to replace those characters.

Related

String or string literal fails

I am trying something simple to follow exercises in a book. For example, typing “hello” at the prompt in the interactions window.
I get the the following error:
“a”: unbound identifier in module in: “a”
I believe simple things like this worked before, so I want to know what to check to resolve this problem.
Your problem are the quotation marks, a very common problem. Look:
“a”
The quotation marks look italic.
They should be like this: "a".
Copy paste this into your REPL and print return (this time it will work!):
"hello"
This is written with the right quoation marks "" and not “” .
If you copy paste from pdf books somteims this wrong quotation marks appear as a result (like Realm of Racket - because recently I had that problem when copy pasting from it). (Quotation marks from MS Word when using Times Romans fonts are also from this strange type, and in some programming blogs, too, the quotation marks are spoiled when copy pasting out of them).
How to avoid it?: Type the examples manually into the DrRacket editor. - problem solved! Plus you learn the things anyway much better if you type them yourself - ("the hard way" approach ;) ).
And you learn, that even copy pasting is a skill which one sometimes has to learn anew - welcome to programming (the long road of learning) :D .
Remember to enter the quotes " around the hello too.
"hello" is a string which contains the text hello
hello is a name of an variable (an identifier),
so if you haven't defined the name hello you get an
error saying that the identifier is undefined

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

Is there a "n/a" symbol in unicode?

Is there an unicode symbol for "n/a"? There are some fractions like ½, but a n/a symbol seems to be missing.
If there is none, what would be the most appropriate unicode symbol to use for n/a in a website (which should be contained in common fonts, to avoid needing a webfont)?
Looking at the Unicode code charts, I do not see a single N/A symbol. I do, however, see ⁿ (U+207F) and ₐ (U+2090), which you could separate with / (U+002F) eg: ⁿ/ₐ, or ̷ (U+0337), eg: ⁿ̷ₐ, or ̸ (U+0338), eg: ⁿ̸ₐ. Probably not what you are hoping for, though. And I don't know if "common" fonts implement them, either.
For future reference, the fastest way I know to answer questions like the OP's when I have them myself is to go to unicodelookup.com, because of the way it works: there's a search bar at the top, and you just type a string and it will return any and all unicode characters containing that string (this is also a great way to discover new and useful symbols). So in the OP's case, he could proceed like this:
first try entering "not" (without the quotes) in the search field
visually scan through the results... doing so would not reveal a "not
applicable" character in this case
try again but this time entering "applic" in the search field
again, doing so would not turn up anything along the lines of what he's
looking for
At that point he would be reasonably confident the current Unicode standard does not have a "n/a" symbol.
If you use Firefox you can define a keyword like "uni" to search that site from the URL bar, meaning any time the browser is open and regardless of what page or site is currently showing, you could do this:
hit [F6]... this moves the cursor to the URL bar at the top
type something like "uni applic" and hit [Enter]... this brings up the
unicodelookup.com website with the search results for "applic" already
showing
For the above to work you would need to define your keyword ("uni" or wtv you prefer) to point to location http://unicodelookup.com/#%s.
There's a Negative Acknowlege icon...
␕ symbol for negative acknowledge 022025 9237 0x2415 ␕
Found by searching negative on the Unicode Lookup site.
I'm not a fan, and for my purposes have just gone with __N/A__ (Markdown..)
I see lots of answers going head-on at the "Not Applicable" abbreviation, without exploring what a symbol is. A quick search for the equivalent phrase "out of scope" brings up a couple of variations on the No symbol: ⃠ – this seems to fit the bill (and since I was looking for a way to represent inapplicability, I'll be using it in my technical document).
Per the Wikipedia article, the Unicode codepoint U+20E0 is a combining character, so it is superimposed on the preceding character; e.g. ! ⃠ overlays an exclamation point. To get it to appear isolated, use a non-breaking space
If you don't want to bother with the combining symbol, the article mentions there's also an emoji U+1F6AB 🚫 but it's typically going to be colored red, or won't render!
There's actually a single character that could be repurposed for this: the "Square Na" character ㎁ (U+3381), which is used to represent the nanoampere in fullwidth (CJK) scripts.
What about the "SYMBOL FOR NULL" ␀ (U+2400)?

SharePoint 2013 REST API odata $filter ignores unicode characters such as German umlauts äöü

I'm trying to use SharePoint 2013 REST API (odata) with unicode characters such as umlauts (ä ö ü).
...?$select=Title%2CID&$filter=substringof%28%27hello%20w%F6rld%27%2C%20Title%29&$orderby=ID%20desc&$top=14
^^ should search for "hello w*ö*rld" using substringof('...', Field)
I'm escaping the URL correctly (and also single quotes with double quotes) and filtering works for all kinds of characters (even backslash and quotes), however, entering ä/ö/ü or any other unicode character has no effect, it is as if those characters were simply filtered out on the server side (i can insert a lot of ääääääs without changing the results).
Any idea how to escape those? I tried the obvious (%ab { \u1234 \xab x1234) without success. Can't find anything on the web or in the specs either.
Thanks for suggestions.
UPDATE - SOLVED
I found that you can use the %uhhhh variant of escaping them:
?$filter=substringof('hello w%u00f6rld')
Of course one must only escape that once (i.e. not the whole thing again), but it seems that's the way to go.
(can't answer my own question now lol)

Converted to Junk Character - When Copy Paste in Text Box

Whenever i Copy and paste any Below Mention CHARACTER in text Box
Below are Copied character ( test this in notepad )
…
”
‘
Below are Typed Character
...
"
'
then that was converted to Junk Character. How can i Block this .
When i Type those character from keybord then it works but when copy paste it converted to Junk.
How can i detect and delete all this character before processing because ..user dont know about this issue ..
I want to delete that character wen user press Submit button.
” and ’ are not junk characters. They are perfectly good Unicode characters (U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK and U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK). Modern applications should be capable of dealing with all Unicode characters; if you can't handle the smart quotes you probably also can't handle accents, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese or any of the other characters users are likely to want to use. You should concentrate on ensuring that your application supports Unicode, rather than trying to fix this one visible symptom.
Pasting ' and " (ASCII straight quote) characters into a text box should not turn them into non-ASCII ‘smart’ quotes. Where they typically tend to come from is Microsoft Word's misguided ‘AutoReplace’ feature, which replaces straight quotes with smart quotes as you type. This is an annoyance, but ultimately it's limited to Office and there's not really much you can do about it. Whilst you can manually replace “ and ” with " by doing a trivial string replacement (and how you do that depends on what language/environment you are talking about), you'll also be removing correct usage of those characters, and you won't be fixing all the other sad broken auto-replacements that MS Office does.
The … single-character ellipsis is a slightly different case, and arguably ‘junk’: to Unicode, U+2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS is a ‘compatibility character’ which is only intended to round-trip nicely to existing encodings that include it as a separate characters. Normally three dot characters should be used instead. You can replace compatibility characters by using Unicode normalisation, in particular Normal Form KC. Again, how you access normalisation is something that depends on your programming language/environment. For example in Python, unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', u'…') gives you u'...'.
Is your vnc client / server ON, try to exit (shutdown) all vnc server / clients and try again - if your copy paste works.