Skip to main content

Facebook loves  

Just recently, Facebook has messed up all instances of a unicode character "à" (latin small letter A with grave, code: U+00E0). My biggest guess is they (Facebook Team) ran into a UI problem so they decide to make dirty str_replace before sending output for both the main site and mobile site. I said it's just some kind of search and replace for the output because getting posts directly with Facebook API works just fine


The replacement originally is "&nbsp;" but for some reasons, it gets displayed as "?nbsp;". FYI, &nbsp; is a html entity which means "no break space". What the hell is it? Normally, all browser will ignore multiple spaces placed together. This is used as a trick to bypass character count in replying post: just type an emoticon (":D", 2 characters), hold the space bar for a few seconds to generate around 20 spaces, type anything else (a period is enough). The post will be displayed with only 1 space between the emoticon and the period. Note that if you don't type the period, it's high chance that the post will be trimed (remove spaces at the beginning and the end) so your post will failed the character count validation. Back to &nbsp;, using it just like space but browser will keep them as it. You put 20 of them, they will be displayed all. Some people even used &nbsp; to indent their stuffs! Actually, it's sometime useful to use &nbsp;, for example when you have to leave an empty <div>
or <td>, you should place a &nbsp; inside to make the XHTML document validated. See the demonstration below: they both have 20 spaces between the emoticon and the period.

  • Using spaces: ":D ."
  • Using &nbsp;: ":D                    ."

Anyway, a bug has been filed but I think Vietnamese users will have to wait. Stay calm, everybody.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Ronen RothfarbApril 24, 2010 at 1:50 PM

    Hebrew users are getting nbsp's instead of the hebrew letter 'nun' (נ)
    :/

    Ronen, Israel.

    ReplyDelete
  2. SơnApril 24, 2010 at 1:53 PM

    Wow. You should definitely vote for the bug. If you haven't had an account, it will take you 1 minute to get one. Vote it so they MAYBE soon notice the problem and fix it.

    PS: Nice to meet you.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Flutter: Fixing Firebase header not found with Notification Service Extension

If you follow the FCM tutorial Send an image in the notification payload and encountered this error message: 'FirebaseMessaging/FirebaseMessaging.h' file not found You are on the right place, I'm going to show you how to fix it. My app was working fine but one day it stopped compiling. Apparently Flutter 1.20 changed the way it uses CocoaPod so the service extension no longer has the proper library configured. After some tinkering, I came up with this pod config, it has to be added to ios/Podfile below the main Runner target. target 'FcmImage' do use_frameworks! use_modular_headers! require File.expand_path('../.symlinks/plugins/firebase_core/ios/firebase_sdk_version.rb', __FILE__) firebase_sdk_version = firebase_sdk_version! pod 'Firebase/Messaging', "~> #{firebase_sdk_version}" end FcmImage is my extension name, replace it with yours We can use a hardcoded version for Firebase/Messaging pod but doing so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Replacing GCP with Railway for faster cold start

TL;DR I switched a Dart API from Cloud Run to Railway for a 300% faster cold start, simplified DevOps, and a straightforward fee structure. Problem I'm working on this project github.com/daohoangson/flutter_widget_from_html . It is a pub.dev package that's super handy for Flutter developers who want to seamlessly render HTML in their apps. Now, when it comes to HTML, it can get pretty dynamic, right? That's why having a playground to showcase features, troubleshoot issues, and tackle bugs is crucial. The Google team has this fantastic tool called dartpad.dev , which is just perfect for this kind of thing. However, there's a little catch - third-party packages like mine usually can't be used there (unless you have thousands of likes, as explained on  Medium ). So I decided to take matters into my own hands, forked it, then deployed try.fwfh.dev with additional package support. Initial idea since 2019 First deployment  in 2021 Cl...
Post a Comment
Read more

OAuth with Google, Twitter and... Facebook!

This is sick! Just a few days ago, I ran into OAuth as I want to get my GMail feed based on Google Data API . I succeeded. With a little help of an OAuth open source ( here , available in several programming languages). Then I remember that I once heard that Twitter also uses OAuth as an authentication option so I turned into Twitter and had a good read. Finally, I found out that they are basically the same (hehe, it's obvious since OAuth 1.0 is a worldwide standard). I had an idea of writing a universal class which can handle both Google and Twitter OAuth functionalities. It's not too hard. I took most of the idea from the PHP example ( here , PHP only). I also made a small script which accepts URI to send and intercept response from Google & Twitter servers. At that moment, I was so excited with all the ideas but actually it has no real world benefit so I just left it there... Until today, in the F8 (says "fate") conference of Facebook, I was stunned fin...
10 comments
Read more