Simon Willison’s Weblog

Cracking The Dave & Buster’s Anomaly. Guilherme Rambo reports on a weird iOS messages bug:

The bug is that, if you try to send an audio message using the Messages app to someone who’s also using the Messages app, and that message happens to include the name “Dave and Buster’s”, the message will never be received.

Guilherme captured the logs from an affected device and spotted an XHTMLParseFailure error.

It turned out the iOS automatic transcription mechanism was recognizing the brand name and converting it to the official restaurant chain's preferred spelling "Dave & Buster’s"... which was then incorrectly escaped and triggered a parse error!