RE: Error Message Feedback

On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 15:15 -0800, Brian MacLeod wrote:

(Not trimmed as much as I would normally for the benefit of the mailing
list, which I'm CCing this thread back to, my response is below)

> My SQL database has some material generated from a PR feed.  This includes
> some characters such as curly inverted commas and hyphen characters that
> fall into some black hole (I'm still not up to speed on the ASCII/ISO/UTF
> thing yet but do understand that there is a block of problematic characters
> in the greater-than-3FH range).  Turns out that one of these characters was
> not purged on entry into the database and was showing up on the problem web
> page in the brief overview portion of the PR material.  Once I corrected the
> character, the Validator gave me good results. 
> 
> Validator problem
> 
> The presence of this hyphen character cases the Validator to baulk and give
> the non-UTF-8 error message I attached to my earlier e-mail message to you.
> This is not accompanied by anything other than the line reference to where
> the offending character was placed.

I _think_, that the problem with showing the source is that the software
would have to display the character, but since the character doesn't
exist in the specified character encoding, it isn't really a character -
its just some random bytes. Random bytes don't map to anything that
_could_ be displayed.

-- 
David Dorward                           <http://dorward.me.uk/>
"Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another."
                             -- The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

Received on Thursday, 1 December 2005 23:23:44 UTC