bugs

i was just corresponding with a fellow Dane when i noticed that all our special characters including tailing letters/spaces was missing from the texts.

is this a character set issue? i tried to change it but the letters is still missing so i guess it didn't make it to the database in the first place

i'm using chrome btw

yea, character set of the game doesnt support too many characters.

Yep, non-English languages are pretty much broken on bmails and forum posts. I think I know what I need to do to fix this and if I'm right, it shouldn't be hard. Can someone post some non-English sentences in this thread I can test with?

Mörkö syö kaikilta pään. åæéø

Flagboy

And for extra points, please post a screenshot from another website or word processor or whatever of what the text should look like.

http://i.imgur.com/7Y46Cqy.png

私はあなたが大好きエンダー

http://i.imgur.com/fiTQG0X.png

Good news. I changed the encoding from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 and that seems to have fixed some things. The issue was not with how the text was being stored, but rather how it was presented, so this should fix the rendering of existing posts/bmails too.

For the posts in this thread:

• Samuli - What language is that? It doesn't look anything like the screenshot you posted. :\ (nor did it change at all after changing the encoding)
• KiNG ERiC - What?
• ArmyOfCocks - The Japanese now renders correctly, w00t.

I also spot checked some of the posts in http://bots4.net/forum/8/2206 (Croatian thread) and they look good now too. If Samuli's issue is resolved, we should be good to go.

Mith, check your bmail again and let us know here how it looks now?

�? Touché?

http://i.imgur.com/87OVnKk.png

Since it works in the preview, but not the actual post, that suggests there actually is a problem with the way it's being stored too. That part will probably be harder to fix, but let's see...

�? Touché!

All right, give it another try. PHP wasn't encoding things properly when escaping user input, but it is now. This unfortunately means most existing non-English posts will continue to render incorrectly because they were saved like that, but things should be fixed going forward.

Oops, false alarm, code update failed. One sec...

€? Touché! Okay, try now. :)

Yay!

Nyt voimme ymmärtää suomea!

I'll try portuguese.

Escapism é o melhor clan em que estive. É uma sensação ótpima! Agora todos os caracteres especiais que me lembro: é, à, á, ó, í, ú, ñ, ç, ê, ã, õ...

It works! and I wrote wrong one word -.-

óptima is the correct word.

En Nederlands dan? ken hij ook Nederlands

Isso não tem caracteres especiais haybassie...

Lietuvių kalba irgi veikia? PanaÅ¡u, kad taip. Ä… Ä Ä™ Ä— į Å¡ ų Å« ž

i don't like this what are you all saying i can only speak one language :(

i don't like this what are you all saying i can only speak one language :(

Hmm, it's not English. So which one is it?

gibberish?

great, can't wait for the croatian thread to appear ....

£ £ £ £ £ £ £ £ £ £

yay no more GB pound :)

as you found out the bmail was saved with errors so they are still missing the special chars.

testing: æ ø å

but the new mails i send works so all good to go

Awesome, glad this works now! Thanks for all the testing help everyone. I'll make an announcement about this so everyone knows they can use non-English characters now.

Interesting... I just noticed I lost my battlecry. I'm guessing it has to do with these changes?

Hm... i've checked a few bots with yeller trophies and they don't have battlecries. A few bots like Nigel and Draoi still seem to have them though. Thognix just got the yeller trophy 4 days ago, but has no battle cry.... Anyone else experience anything like this?

You can add battle cries just to get the trophy, then remove them once you have it

Yeah I figured that, but my battle cry disappeared and I don't share this bot. I may have had some special characters in it before and it got wiped when Ender implemented this change? Which is why I specified that Draoi and Nigel still had their battlecries, cause they would be less likely to put in some strange characters into their battlecry as compared to some other bots from different countries.

From memory, I think my battle cry used to be something like this

(      '.')~c (#) Here's a strudel

But when I tried putting that into my battlecry (after I realized it was missing) It can only display as this during fights:

 ( '.')~c (#) Here's a strudel 

It would be hard for most people to notice this (if this is an actual bug) unless they are fighting their main or ratio whore or dumper and that particular bot has a battlecry

This shouldn't have affected battle cries. I'll take a look.

I'm thinking you're mistaken, shoyuken. This update didn't touch any of the underlying data stored for forum posts, bmails, battle cries, etc.

To further confirm, I checked the 3/28 backup (taken 12:05am ET) and found your original battle cry was present.

The issue with the repeated spaces being collapsed to a single one doesn't look new (and probably not worth addressing). I tried rolling back the changes involved in making non-English characters work on the game and they still got collapsed to a single space.

That's normal behavior though, multiple spaces are always compacted in html.

Instead you could try to use a bunch of:

 

Yeah, the question is whether the code that displays the battle cries should replace regular spaces with non-breakable spaces so that they don't get collapsed. I'd argue no, but I could be swayed if people really want this.

i think it would be better to just put it in the text formatting guide, along with some of the other commonly used entities for making white space

There's no special formatting allowed for battle cries. I suspect that most people don't care about whitespace in them, but if this were to be supported, it wouldn't require special formatting on the user's part, just a replacement of spaces with " " characters when outputting so that consecutive ones don't get collapsed.

I'd recommend opening a suggestions thread if anyone really wants to see this feature added since the bug this thread is about, non-English characters, is fixed. :)