Simon Willison’s Weblog

Headsup, Si, your quote is displaying with lots of funny characters. Might just be my character set on Firebird (UK version, I think), but thought you'd like to know :-) Out of interest, do you remember my saying something very similar when we were talking about useless lecturers and teaching Maths way back in the first year?

Meri - 15th January 2004 09:45 - #

Also displays funny on Mozilla 1.5 (Win2k, UK), but is OK on IE. Suspect the old magic quotes are to fault.

Ben Thorp - 15th January 2004 10:11 - #

The funny characters are caused by attempting to use UTF-8 characters (in this case U+2019: Right Single Quotation Mark) in a website that is being treated by Mozilla as a Content-type of ISO-8859-1.

The following line in the source for this site:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" />

would appear to make this site UTF-8, however <meta http-equiv="..."> has no meaning in XHTML. There are 2 ways to specify the content-type of an XHTML document:

• Send an HTTP header of Content-type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8
• Send an XML declaration with something like: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> at the top of the page

Xiven - 15th January 2004 10:13 - #

Also note that under PHP you should not use the htmlentities() function on UTF-8 encoded data, since it is not multi-byte compliant (you'll end up with yet more gobbledegook). The best course of action is to use htmlspecialchars() instead, as this only encodes the essential characters ('<' -> '&lt;', '>' -> '&gt;', '"' -> '&quot;') which are single-byte characters without the high bit set (the rest of the characters can be found in Unicode anyway hence do not need encoding).

Xiven - 15th January 2004 12:02 - #

I am sure you are already aware of this, but I noticed that your "blogs I read" section doesn't appear to be updating.

Simon Jessey - 15th January 2004 12:07 - #

Oops, sorry for the excessive commenting. I retract my last comment, as support for UTF-8 in the htmlentities() function was added in PHP 4.3.0 (which my host is finally upgrading to this week...)

Xiven - 15th January 2004 12:59 - #

Isn't the second law backwards? It's your problem if you're not understanding because you are the one who has to ask them to repeat it. Otherwise, they are exactly the same law.

Britt - 15th January 2004 23:56 - #

Britt,
that's the point.

What Tim is saying is, if you're explaining to someone and they don't understand, that's your problem, so you're going to have to try again, and if someone explains something to you, and you don't understand, it's their problem, so you shouldn't feel embarrassed about asking them to clarify.

Lach - 16th January 2004 00:50 - #

The second law is not really a law, it is just a corollary of the first law.

arb - 16th January 2004 02:07 - #

I'm sorry. Could you explain that to me one more time? :-)

Britt - 16th January 2004 17:05 - #

At the risk of looking stupid if that was a joke:

If you don't understand someone's explanation, they're at fault, and need to try to explain better. Likewise, if someone doesn't understand yours, you need to explain it better. Basically, Tim is saying that you shouldn't be embarrassed to ask someone to clarify what they've said.

Lach - 17th January 2004 01:28 - #