[geeklog-devel] Handling of 'special' characters in 1.60sr2

[Rob Griffiths]

After a long and sometimes frustrating afternoon, macosxhints.com is  
finally upgraded to Geeklog 1.6.0sr2. One of the reasons I was really  
looking forward to this upgrade was the better handling of special  
characters in story submissions, which I seem to recall reading about  
in this list over the last year or two.

Unfortunately, my experience with the new system is that handling of  
special characters is still broken, though not quite as badly as  
before - at least on my domain. As an example, I tried this very basic  
test story (on both macosxhints.com and geeklog.net), submitted in  
HTML mode:

<pre>a \ b <> c | d $ e</pre>

<code>a \ b <> c | d $ e</code>
<br><br>
<tt>a \ b <> c | d $ e</tt>
<br><br>
a \ b <> c | d $ e

My expectation for the output of this story would be:

[mono]a \ b <> c | d $ e

a \ b <> c | d $ e

a \ b <> c | d $ e[end mono[

a \ b <> c | d $ e

On geeklog.net, this worked as expected. On macosxhints.com, though,  
all the backslashes were stripped out, from both the coded bits, and  
the plain HTML final line. Does anyone have any idea *why* it works on  
one site, but not another, when both are running 1.6.0.sr2? I've  
looked at the various config options, but don't see anything there  
that would explain this oddity. Something in the PHP configuration?

Even worse than the missing backslashes, though, is what has happens  
to the input area -- the special characters are now displayed as their  
HTML entities, making the submission very hard to read. For instance:

<pre>a \ b <> c | d $ e</pre>

To a user, the conversion of the normal characters to their HTML  
entities may be very confusing, especially in the bit of "regular"  
text after the code examples. For my users, this is far from ideal --  
the text in the input form shouldn't, in my opinion, ever change from  
what the user put there. I understand it needs to be encoded for  
display, but it should be unencoded in the input box. In Geeklog 1.4,  
this didn't happen at all -- sure, it ate the backslashes, but all the  
rest of the characters were displayed in their normal form.

Help? Any chance of fixes for the encoding of the submission form? Any  
idea how I can get my backslashes to work as they do on geeklog.net?

thanks;
-rob.