no double-quotes in custom titles?

So Shimaspawn suggested that the reason my custom title for E. E. "Doc" Smith got rejected is because of technical problems with double-quotes. If this is the case (I still haven't gotten confirmation), then it's a regression, because double-quotes used to work, as with EE Doc Smith (the non-namespaced version of the same article; now a redirect).

As a programmer myself, I realize that handling special characters safely and correctly can be both tricky and frustrating, but I really don't want to start fixing the wicks on this one until the proper custom title is in place.

If all else fails, I suppose I could use single-quotes, but that's more the British style, and Doc Smith was an American author, so I'd rather not, unless Eddie or someone says that's the only option. If it's simply a matter of waiting until Eddie has time to fix the problem, I can wait. But I'd kind of like to know one way or the other what is, or is likely to be, going on.

TIA

eta: some images showing why I want the quotes here: [1]◊, [2]◊, [3]◊, [4]◊, [5]◊, [6]◊.

edited 28th Jul '12 1:06:10 PM by Xtifr

Double quotes still work, but not consistently. Occasionally if someone puts smart quotes in there or is using non-standard versions of characters, the thing goes down.

Hmm, ok, does that mean I should resubmit the title in question? (As a Linux user, I assure you I won't attempt to use Microsoft's proprietary "smart" quotes, nor will I bother with proper unicode slanted double quotes, “ and ”.

edited 28th Jul '12 5:21:24 PM by Xtifr

Yeah, try it again with normal double quotes ".

Ok, submitted.

Nope. Didn't work. Let me try something.

Hah! The funny quotes work. The straight ones don't.

Heh, cute. Wonder if we should leave the thread open so FE can take a look at the regular double-quotes issue? Aside from that, looks great, thanks!

I also encountered this issue with Meet My Good Friends Lefty and Righty. Should be "Meet My Good Friends, "Lefty" and "Righty"", but it's presently "Meet My Good Friends,".

It turns out that ampersands don't work any more either? I moved Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell (which has an ampersand) to the Literature/ namespace, and submitted a custom title request, but Shimaspawn told me that it didn't work, so the namespaced version still shows as Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

edited 6th Sep '12 1:57:23 AM by Xtifr

Y'know, I kind of wonder what would happen if we escaped the quotation marks (eg: I Call Her "Vera" would be I Call Her \\"Vera\\")? Would that fix anything, irrespective of any back-end fixes?

I don't really have a good dummy article to test this on, though.

edited 11th Oct '12 11:22:14 AM by ShadowHog

Ampersands sometimes work and sometimes don't. It seems to be something about how the-person-requesting-the-custom-title's computer encodes special characters and how the wiki code parse them.

I'm pretty sure my computer encodes ampersand as ASCII (which is a proper subset of UTF-8 and TV Trope's default latin1/iso8859-1). If there's another way I should be encoding it, let me know, and I'm sure I can arrange it. With 30+ years of software development experience and a vast array of network tools and libraries at my fingertips, I'm sure I can arrange to send any sequence of bits down the wire that you might desire. :)

If anyone can find a proper way to make a macron appear I'd be grateful. The custom title widget doesn't give me a legit code for macrons.

edited 12th Oct '12 1:05:33 PM by lu127

Does it work with HTML? Then, here could be a help.

By the way, the problem mentioned earlier with ampersands seems to have been silently fixed. Ampersands once again work in custom titles. I wonder if the problem with double-quotes has also been fixed while we weren't looking? (I don't have a convenient page to test with.)

I used this page when I was testing my "escape characters" theory (they didn't work btw). I suppose you could do so as well?