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Question Details Asked By Asked On
Yes You noticed it!!!! Pride_of_Alderaban 11/08/06
    Answerway doesn't display backslashes, even though they appear at the entry point of a posting...

    So now You know!!!

    Janne alias Pride...

      Clarification/Follow-up by Jim.McGinness on 11/08/06 8:11 pm:
      There's still a discrepancy between the preview and the final posting. With a great deal more experimentation, I might be able to say with more certainty what's going on, but here's just a few test strings:

      ; - input as (ampersand)amp(semicolon)(number sign)92(semicolon)

      - input as (ampersand)(number sign)92

      \ - input as (ampersand)amp(semicolon)amp(semicolon)(number sign)92(semicolon)

      Clarification/Follow-up by Jim.McGinness on 11/08/06 8:19 pm:
      In the preview, the middle alternative of that first clarification actually showed a backslash! Not there in the final post, though.

      A few more tries:

      & - entered as (backslash)(ampersand)amp(ampersand)(number sign)92

      - entered as (ampersand)(number sign)92(ampersand)amp(semicolon)(number sign)92

      Clarification/Follow-up by Jim.McGinness on 11/08/06 9:04 pm:
      More discrepancies between preview and final text. And, one other thing I'll need to check: Firefox on Mac (which I'm using now) may display something different from IE on Win or some other combination. I've run into those sorts of incompatibilities often enough!

      &backslash; - entered as (ampersand)backslash(semicolon)

      & - entered as (ampersand)(backslash)(ampersand)(number sign)92

      Clarification/Follow-up by Jim.McGinness on 11/08/06 9:11 pm:
      Attempting to put a number, such as a year, in quotes causes a different sort of display problem, sometimes resulting in the display of some oddball character instead of the year in quotes.

      񓟶" - entered as (double quote)2006(double quote)

      ඤ" - entered as (double quote)92(double quote)

      Clarification/Follow-up by Jim.McGinness on 11/08/06 9:15 pm:
      No, looking at the source, I see that the double-quote problem arises as a result of sloppiness in the elementizing of certain characters. Since Answerway's scripts don't include the (expected) semicolon when substituting elements, the numbers simply get run together in a way that causes the browser to swallow all of the numbers and burp.

      񓟶" - entered as (double quote)(semicolon)2006(double quote)(semicolon)

      - entered as (ampersand)(number sign)92(semicolon)(ampersand)(number sign)92(semicolon)(ampersand)amp(number sign)92

      Clarification/Follow-up by Jim.McGinness on 11/09/06 1:48 pm:
      Ladybug,

      I was just attempting to discover whether there was a way to slip past the combination of coding errors that prevents ordinary display of backslashes. Without being able to inspect the PHP source code, I'm now at a loss to guess whether the errors can be worked around. I think I've tried all the obvious ways and some non-obvious ways to get a backslash element presented to the browser in a final posting.

      The original backslashes and some of the element encoded backslashes survive through some aspects of the preview step, but they are all stomped out (incorrectly, I'd argue) in the final post.

      Anyway, this all started with the post at:

      http://answerway.com/viewques.php?category=121&quesid=54655

      Clarification/Follow-up by Pride_of_Alderaban on 11/10/06 1:53 am:
      I already have had the problem with the backslash in postings...

      Simply they don't show up in the postings

      Answerway replied to me when I complained about this fact with that for some reasons (I can't remember at at the moment what it was and I didn't bother to keep the mail they sent) it wasn't possible to display the backslash in postings.

 
Answered By Answered On
Jim.McGinness 11/08/06
I wonder. I've seen it swallow up single and double backslashes. What about

three

four

five

six

seven

or eight!

Various languages use backslash as an "escape" character and each level of interpretation the string goes through may strip off one or half of the backslashes. At some point, to be preserved, the backslash would need to be protected by being turned into an HTML element &;#92;(as is done for > and < - angle brackets - > or < otherwise used to denote HTML tags.

In looking at the HTML source of the preview of this message, I can see that the backslashes are (naively) doubled by Answerway's software -- but stripped from the display text for some reason. It seems to simply be a misunderstanding built into the scripts that run the site.

I just hope some of the coding I've put into the message survives not only the transition to preview text but also to the final answer text....I'll comment on the discrepancies that show up.

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