Puzzle Description Suppressed:Click below to view spoilers

#1: Norma Dee (norm0908) on Jun 23, 2017

Is that what that is? I hadn't looked at it that closely. :)

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Aldege knows.

Could be more than a few folks around with questions in their hearts, was my first thought when I saw this. Now I recognize I've seen that symbol too, though not on the tablet I'm using to access this site. Cute, easy puzzle for my tired brain. Thanks.

That's funny Brian. It has been said that I am heartless,however the question mark should be more in reference as to whether I have a brain or not. :)

hahahaha! good one, Al.....;)

nice puzz, Brian. I bet you could make this a tough blotted clues puzz if you so wished....

Perfect little puzzle.

There is no question, Aldege has the biggest heart of all.
♥

Gee thx Teresa. Too bad it barely beats. :)

I get that, too. Some computers are smarter that others, when it comes to recognizing accented letters.

LOL, #3

The problem actually seems to be a server configuration error. The puzzle server is serving up the page with a "UTF-8" character set, but the web page server is labeling it as having a "Western" (extended ASCII) character set.

On Firefox, you can choose View|Text Encoding|Unicode to see those pesky letters as they should be.

I'm not overly concerned with it. I just thought it would make a nice puzzle.

Great find Brian. Before I started solving I tried to find a word in 'Aldege' but couldn't so I figured you must be smarter than I

The other two in this miniseries have a word at the heart of their ID.

Hm. I wonder if I can convince the site to do this correctly. I need to go wrangle kids right now, and I have several items on my To Do list, but I'll add this to it.

If anybody happens to have a link to a page where the site does this wrong, that would be helpful toward fixing it.

Two of my titles have this problem:
https://webpbn.com/7931
https://webpbn.com/21613

This also shows up on the search page
http://webpbn.com/find.cgi?search=1&minid=7931


But wait!?! I just made a new one with some unicode in the title. https://webpbn.com/32401 That one shows up fine on my edit page and my saveedit.cgi page, but is screwed up on the solve page. BUT IN A DIFFERENT WAY. Instead of the unicode "Replacement Character" it is showing a two-character replacement for the o-with-umlaut and three-character replacements for a Hangul character and a (unicode) dingbat character.

This may be because I am on a Windows 10 computer now and the other puzzles were made on a Windows 7 computer. Or a newer version of chrome? Or...

OK and I just checked out my two old puzzles - they are screwed up on the find puzzles page (with the unicode "replacement character") and also the "previously saved solution" page, but are now showing CORRECTLY on the actual puzzle page. (They did not previously.)

This computer is Windows 10 with chrome 73.0.3683.103

Oh, and when those two puzzles were made, in 2010 and 2013, the titles showed just fine everywhere.

edit: The new puzzle also shows up fine on the comments page and pop-up. The old ones do not. It seems the behavior is completely opposite between the old unicode ones and the new ones.

OK, I just looked on my win 7 computer with the same version of chrome and the display quirks are the same.

Comment Suppressed:Click below to view spoilers

I would guess that it is e with accent grave - that fits with the French pronunciation that I mentally assign to the name. From the title of this puzzle, I now have a tune running through my head:

There's an e gave right
that blurs in your sight
Deep in the heart of Aldege...

I couldn't remember whether it was a regular accent or a backward accent. So I looked it up on the forum, and found something interesting.

When I looked up plain "Aldege", I got many plain ones and several with the unicode 'replacement character'. All were posted between January 2012 and January 2013. (Although the forum only displays a maximum of 40 links per search.)

When I searched with the accent, it returned 40 links with the reverse accent (Aldège). The earliest I found was July of 2013 and the latest was January 2019.

This indicates that there are probably two different errors going on. One is in the encoding of new content which changed somewhere in early 2013. The other is in the display, which is ongoing.

Looking up the replacement character, I found this article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specials_(Unicode_block)#Replacement_character


It looks like the original problem was that these extended Latin letters were being encoded in ISO-8859-1, but were being served as UTF-8. This produces the diamond-question-mark for the non-ASCII characters.

Currently the extended-Latin (and unicode) is being saved as three-byte unicode, but is being served up on some pages as ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252 and those three byte are thus being shown as three extended-ASCII characters.

The fix for the display problem might be to make sure that all pages are coded to display UTF-8.

The fix for the diamond-question-mark would be more complicated. And I'm not sure it could be automated. It would be to go through old content searching for characters that are extended-ASCII and changing them to the corresponding unicode. The problem being that if you come across any actual unicode, it may change one or more of its bytes making it into nonsense.

If the input problem was confined to a time period, and no unicode was recorded in that period, you could run the replacement on just that time.

To keep the problem from reoccurring, all input should be in unicode and/or screened for extended-ASCII characters which should be translated into unicode. Then all output should be displayed in unicode.

I have Windows 10. Like you, the title looks correct when I see it on the list of puzzles, but while solving it's full of errors.

And yes, Aldège has an accent grave over the E (as in "très")

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