Monday, July 9, 2012

I can't believe that nobody has picked up on that Flannery O'Connor quote yet.

AMDG

17 comments:

  1. Maybe because nobody has recognized it. I haven't.

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  2. Well, I know that's why, but I thought somebody would.

    AMDG

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  3. Some might have recognized it, but didn't comment. I can think of some suspects for that.

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  4. I can think of one for sure, but he through Flannery over for his new love.

    AMDG

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    Replies
    1. To A, 1 October 60. Please forgive my tardiness. And who knew an "'" equaled "&39;" in blogger's comboxes. Flannery O'Connor would have been as amused as I am now.

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  6. Hurrah, Toby! Chapter and verse, yet.

    Those 39s and their friends drive me nuts. I wish I could figure out what to do about them.

    To those who don't know what Toby is talking about, Flannery O'Connor thought that To Kill a Mockingbird was a children's book and she wrote that in a letter to a friend who is designated as A in The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters.

    AMDG

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  7. I figured it was somewhere in the letters but didn't have any idea what book she was referring to. That seems sorta harsh.

    If I may go all geeky for a minute: I see what's going on withn your 39s but I don't know why. Here's my first comment above as it appears in the source code of this page. I'm going to paste it in character for character, but I expect it's going to appear with ampersand-pound-thirty-nine before and after the text: 'Maybe because nobody has recognized it. I haven\46#39;t.'

    Whatever software Blogger uses to generate the page is enclosing all comment text in single quotes. That means that single quotes within the text must be encoded, otherwise they'll be taken as half of a pair and things will really be messed up. The standard HTML solution for this is to substitute the text equivalent of the numeric value that constitutes the actual character, prefixed by ampersand-pound-number and followed by a semicolon. The number is the value of the 8 ones and zeroes that that represent the character, expressed as a number but written out in text. It will not surprise you to learn that decimal 39 = single quote. Blogger is for some reason encoding the ampersand, which I think it shouldn't, but not the pound. The ampersand is backslash-forty-six. The browser would know to turn "&#39" into a single quote. But it's getting backslash-forty-six-pound. So it turns the backslash-forty-six into an ampersand correctly. But what's left is not the encoding for a single quote, it's just a pound sign followed by two digits. Ok, fine, I'll print that, says the browser.

    Sorry, didn't realize that was going to take so long, but now that I've typed it I'm going to post it. here is why it's 39. I sort of doubt that you have any control over this within Blogger.

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  8. Thank you, Maclin, for typing all that. I hate to say this but I was rather comforted to see the same thing on Sally's blog one day. I've considered using different software, but Blogger is so unhelpful that I'm afraid it would be a nightmare even trying to do it.

    AMDG

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  9. And I don't care if it is a children's book. I love it and I love the movie and I wish Harper Lee had written something else.

    AMDG

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  10. Wouldn't this work for an apostrophe?

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  11. I googled the problem and it mostly brings up questions on Blogger's help forum that have been deleted. The only solutions I've come across are "do not use apostrophes, ampersands, or (some other puntuation mark - I forget what)", and something in French which says that adding the following script to the javascript of the recent comments gadget should solve the problem:
    String.prototype.unescapeHtml = function ()
    {
    var temp = document.createElement("div");
    temp.innerHTML = this;
    var resu = temp.childNodes[0].nodeValue;
    temp.removeChild(temp.firstChild);
    return resu;
    }

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  12. There's also a different version of the "recent comments" widget, that you can add by clicking the "add to blogger button" at the bottom of this post: http://viti-vino.blogspot.be/2012/05/gadget-recent-comment.html

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  13. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  14. I've added it here (http://catechesesavio.blogspot.be/) so you can see what it does.

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  15. (Oh, and the quote gave me a chuckle; but what is there to say?)

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  16. Well, thanks for all that, Paul, I appreciate your effort, and when I get rid of my splitting headache, I will take a look.

    AMDG

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