Comments on Christopher Miller's random thoughts: When HTML encoding can bite you

I'm using the twitter api to post new blogpost...

2009-11-07T12:24:04.968-05:00

I'm using the twitter api to post new blogpost to twitter. The posts are normaly in norwegian with the norwegian letters æ ø å. They are also encoded and with a # in the code. TweetDeck has still this issue.

Thanks for that information Mario. That would mak...

2009-11-05T10:41:54.944-05:00

Thanks for that information Mario. That would make sense with TweetDeck. If you assume that everything that has a "#" character is a hashtag, then you are going to have problems.

This should be easy to fix for this case though. They should only identify hashtags when "#" is at the beginning of the text or is preceded by a " ". I don't know if that fixes everything, but it's a move in the right direction.

Hi there - Mario from twitterfeed here. Just a cou...

2009-11-05T10:26:26.250-05:00

Hi there - Mario from twitterfeed here. Just a couple of clarifications:

- the issue with TweetDeck and some other twitter clients is actually slightly more complex: they see a "#" character in the text, and try to automatically turn it into a link (to support automatic links for hashtags). This means they insert code like <a href=...> inside the HTML entity, which obviously breaks it. You can actually see this in your screenshot - the "8217" has been turned into a link because it appears after the has character. I'm in frequent contact with the TweetDeck guys and they are aware of the issue, and are working on a fix as far as I know.

- re. facebook, we are still working on trying to find a way to post HTML entities and other non-English characters to their Stream.publish API method. Other developers seem to have the same problem, so we're still trying to figure out if this is a Facebook API bug, or if there is anything we can do to fix at our end.

Hope this helps, cheers,
Mario.