Unicode seems to be working!

September 5, 2002 10:06 PM

Looks like Matt fixed the evil box problem. Thanks, Matt! Does this mean free ponys Unicode is working too?
If this has been mentioned before and I've missed it, administrator, please delet me!
posted by Slithy_Tove to feature requests at 10:06 PM (24 comments total)

Is this why the server was down a while ago? Very cool, almost makes the Metafilter withdrawal induced shakes and blurred vision worth it.
posted by Grod at 10:10 PM on September 5, 2002

grammar police, I know there should be some hyphens in there somewhere, please don't attack me
posted by Grod at 10:11 PM on September 5, 2002

I had a good link all ready to post, and I was horrified that someone might take my idea.

Then I realized I couldn't post it anyway, because of my Dracula post.
posted by Yelling At Nothing at 10:19 PM on September 5, 2002

It goes between Metafilter and withdrawal. Or between withdrawal and induced. Or both.

The grammar police are flexible.
posted by Yelling At Nothing at 10:21 PM on September 5, 2002

“Smart quotes” - “Smart quotes”
posted by riffola at 10:23 PM on September 5, 2002

?unicode ????????
posted by bobo123 at 10:26 PM on September 5, 2002

Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter which language, therefore I can write out my last name in Gujarati like this જોશી, and if you had a font capable of displaying Gujarati characters you could see it.
posted by riffola at 10:31 PM on September 5, 2002

Wow, I have a font capable of displaying Gujarati characters...what the hell is Gujarati?
posted by Grod at 10:46 PM on September 5, 2002

nope, I actually didn't fix anything.

And the webserver stopped responding for about an hour due to some errors on the main disk drive. That's not a good thing, so I'll either be attempting some all-night defrags, or I'll be replacing the hard disk soon.
posted by mathowie at 10:50 PM on September 5, 2002

To answer my own question:

Gujarati is an Indic language spoken by approximately 44,000,000 people, primarily in the state of Gujarat on the western coast of India but also by sizeable communities elsewhere in South Asia and worldwide.

posted by Grod at 10:50 PM on September 5, 2002

Gujarati is the official state language of Gujarat, a state in India, and it happens to be my mother tongue.
posted by riffola at 10:54 PM on September 5, 2002

But 'smart quotes' seem to be working sometimes... riffola, what did you do in your MeTa post? I'm getting boxes around the first two words, but smart quotes around the second two. My link is to a post where it looks like the smart quotes from a cut&pasted text were preserved rather than boxed. And I'm seeing Gujarati, but not whatever bobo123 posted.


æ?¥æ?¬èª?ã??ã?ã??大ä¸?夫ã??でã?ã??ã?ï¼?
posted by Slithy_Tove at 10:56 PM on September 5, 2002

I used the smart quotes as is in the first ones, and the ascii codes for the same in the second one. I wrote out my last name in Gujju (a slang for Gujarati) using ascii codes.
posted by riffola at 11:00 PM on September 5, 2002

riffola, by 'ascii codes', do you mean Unicode? Here are the Unicode codes for the kanji for 'nihongo':

???
posted by Slithy_Tove at 11:05 PM on September 5, 2002

Here's what I posted:

日本語

They appeared as kanji in the edit box, what you see above on the preview screen, and three question marks in MeTa.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 11:07 PM on September 5, 2002

日本語
posted by riffola at 11:13 PM on September 5, 2002

ok that's odd, I see it in preview, but not when I post it.

Yes I made those characters using Unicode.
posted by riffola at 11:14 PM on September 5, 2002

And boxes are still appearing in FPP's, like here. Oh, well.

The 'smart quotes' in the post I linked to do appear to be Unicode, specifically “ and ”. I'm not sure why come Unicode works and some doesn't.

So I was wrong. [slaps himself around a bit with a large trout] Maybe Matt should just delete this thread.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 11:41 PM on September 5, 2002

I like the sound of 'Gujju' - is that with long oo's? Sounds like a chocolate drink, or maybe a Swedish pop band.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:42 AM on September 6, 2002

You could always type the character entities.
posted by holloway at 12:54 AM on September 6, 2002

Yeah Stav, Gujju is pronouced as Gooj joo, a J sound, not a Y :)
posted by riffola at 1:06 AM on September 6, 2002

I understand that the thread has taken a vast shift to the east of me, but on Mac OS X 10.2 / Internet Explorer 5.5, I still see "boxes" in some of the above... In case you're still trying to debug this, Matt.
posted by JollyWanker at 6:18 AM on September 6, 2002

Here's something interesting:

Let's take unicode character #149, the lowly bullet (•).

#149 results in •
#0149 results in •
#00149 results in •

So, three digit entities are OK, four digits are fine, and five digits are as broken as all get out.
posted by iceberg273 at 7:35 AM on September 6, 2002

#00149 results in • if you preview first.

Anyways, the above should explain the gujju / kanji dichotomy.
posted by iceberg273 at 7:43 AM on September 6, 2002