A story of undisplayable chars.

[Mike Zornek]

I was browsing my website today when I noticed an entry that had two of
those square characters (that generally mean an undisplayable character) in
a seemingly random spot in a paragraph. To investigate I opened up
MoveableType on Safari (10.3.3) I looked at the entry but is seemed find. I
copied and pasted the text into BBEdit and showed invisibles. There I saw
two upside down question marks. Offending text is here:

http://mikezornek.com/temp/bad_char_web_input.txt

When this text is parsed by Markdown w/ SmartyPants the offending chars are
not stripped out, nor throw warnings (Does Markdown throw warnings at all?
Can I turn on a debug mode?). However when rendered in Safari as HTML, the
characters show as the square chars. (Note they are fine when viewing the
TXT.)

Interesting as well if you paste the text into a textarea on safari and use
the keyboard's arrow keys to move the insertion point it does in fact take
extra key presses to move the insertion point past the characters, even
though they do not render in the view.

As to why these came up in the first place: I vaguely remember hitting
option + e a few times to generate an e with an accent. But I also remember
deleting those chars before publishing the post. Perhaps not all aspect of
the chars were deleted? Maybe I am thinking I deleted them, but I didn't and
Perl caused this? I'm not sure .. But wanted to post the strangeness to the
list.

If anyone else can confirm this and post some more notes perhaps I'll write
a bug report for Apple if warranted. I need some more info myself though,
since I suspect this may be a simple thing of non-unicode support or
something.

~ Mike
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Mike Zornek
Web Designer, Media Developer, Programmer and Geek
Personal site: <http://MikeZornek.com>
New Project: <http://WebDevWiki.com>