MeFi music playlist flash widget incorrectly displays ampersands

November 28, 2008 8:31 PM

The MeFi music playlist flash widget displays tracks with ampersands in their name incorrectly.

For example, if you add Flesh & Bone to a playlist, it shows up in the flash widget as "Flesh & Bone by saulgoodman" instead of "Flesh & Bone by saulgoodman".

posted by RichardP to Bugs at 8:31 PM (15 comments total)

Thanks for letting us know, it should be working now.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:44 PM on November 28, 2008

The title also shows up like that in the RSS feed...at least in Firefox live bookmarks
posted by TwoWordReview at 8:49 PM on November 28, 2008

That's just how we roll. Live with it.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:05 PM on November 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

Quick work pb! Thanks for the fix.
posted by RichardP at 9:12 PM on November 28, 2008

This is why the Beatles didn't title it "& I Love Her".

(Though now that pb's fixed it, maybe Sir Paul will retitle it and post it to MeFiMu.)

By the way... could you folks start sending me MeFiMusic Challenge ideas again? We're starting to run out...
posted by flapjax at midnite at 11:06 PM on November 28, 2008

That's just how we live. Roll with it.
posted by blue_beetle at 12:42 AM on November 29, 2008

Uh oh... now the new post preview is changing &image to ℑ and _ to spaces.
posted by Kattullus at 10:56 AM on November 29, 2008

After talking to cortex I realize that my previous comment isn't all that clear. I had written a post with links to images in a database. Here is an example URL followed by the text that it got turned into when I hit preview:

http://research.mayavase.com/portfolio_hires.php?search=*Olmec*&date_added=&image=1944b&display=8&rowstart=0

http://research.mayavase.com/portfolio hires.php?search=*Olmec*&date added=ℑ=1944b&display=8&rowstart=0

Now, when I copy-paste the second text string I get this:

http://research.mayavase.com/portfolio_hires.php?search=*Olmec*&date_added=%E2%84%91=1944b&display=8&rowstart=0

As you can see &image got changed to ℑ and underscores to spaces but when I copy and paste the text string the underscores remain but &image has been changed to %E2%84%91.
posted by Kattullus at 11:13 AM on November 29, 2008

Actually, now that I look at the actual html that preview churns out it is:

http://research.mayavase.com/portfolio_hires.php?search=*Olmec*&date_added=ℑ=1944b&display=8&rowstart=0

Which somehow loses the underscores when I click the preview link.
posted by Kattullus at 11:49 AM on November 29, 2008

Kattullus, thanks for the info. I'll take a look at it. Just to be clear: it sounds like your issue is on MeFi and not related to the Flash Music player in any way.
posted by pb (staff) at 12:53 PM on November 29, 2008

Yeah. I didn't want to post a whole new bug post and this seemed vaguely related, what with ampersand issues and everything. Slightly more data: I posted a link 10 days ago that had underscores and that was fine. I just posted those links to the front page by replacing the garbled URLs with the actual ones after I had previewed so whatever it is has something to do with preview.
posted by Kattullus at 1:01 PM on November 29, 2008

Yep, the text wasn't being escaped properly for the form fields. It should be better now, but I didn't ever see anything strange happening with spaces and underscores.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:22 PM on November 29, 2008

As long as we're discussing character entities and escaping, allow me to note that preview "eats"
character entities in Ask Metafilter "New Question" and MetaTalk "New Post". Interestingly the main MetaFilter "New Post" does not display this behavior.

In more detail, after clicking preview in Ask and MeTa text that generates character entities (i.e. "&" or "ℑ") get turned into their literal equivalents (i.e. & or ℑ) in the post text entry box - so if you preview before you post you can get something other than you expected.
posted by RichardP at 5:29 PM on November 29, 2008

Thanks, pb!

I don't know what was going on with the underscores. Maybe it was a Firefox thing. I'm using 3.0.4 on XP.
posted by Kattullus at 7:10 PM on November 29, 2008

The Ask and MetaTalk post forms should be escaped properly now too.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:02 PM on December 1, 2008