Profile changes revert after signature is italicised

For some reason, each time I attempt to italicise the quote that is in my signature, my profile does not save the changes and the edit profile page merely refreshes, reverting other changes such as avatar, location and title back to how they were before the attempted italics were entered.

Here is the full quote for you to attempt to duplicate:

Hate is just repackaged fear, and if you tear away the layers of a hateful person, you'll usually find a scared little kid in there.

I have tested this quote by adding and removing words, and removing a single character appears to be enough to allow the '' symbols on either end to remain without a profile reversion. Is the character limit for italicised text different to that of regular text? Whenever I add random characters that are in between the italics code and within character limit, they still cause this reversion past a certain number of characters - around 135 or so.

While it's little more than an annoyance to me, I'd like to make sure whether this apparent italics limit is a bug or a conscious choice.

The limit for signatures is 140 characters, and this includes any markup you use. Thus, italicising text uses up four characters and the limit for everything else becomes 136. Bolding text would use up six characters, and so on.

I have accounted for this. My quote contains 136 characters with the markup, 132 without. If this were not the case, I would be unable to enter the quote into the signature line at all, yet it works fine until I attempt to add the markup in this particular quote and save my results.

The html expands into more characters. Here's a fix: drop the owrd 'just'. It is usually droppable. Like this:

Hate is repackaged fear. If you tear away the layers of a hateful person, you'll find a scared little kid in there.

Also fixed a run-on sentence and removed another equivocation.

edited 26th Aug '14 5:59:55 AM by FastEddie

That works out nicely. Thanks, Eddie.

So the 140-character limit is not in wiki markup, but in resulting HTML markup?

That's what I'm taking from this, and it sort of makes sense. The wiki markup in itself isn't the code, just a handy way of quickly encoding the site.