GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 119686
Obscure error message when "Curly quote" characters are pasted into a message.
Last modified: 2006-06-18 05:04:45 UTC
I often copy and paste from Mozilla into Pan (because I'm a smartass and I like to use the dictionary to prove my points, but that's not the issue). Dictionary.com, the dictionary used to look up works on Google, uses "Curly Quote" characters (ASCII 147 and 148, apparently, though I'm not 100% sure) to delimit quotations. When I copy and paste a definition from there into a followup in Pan, and subsequently go to post the message, I get a cryptic message stating "ERROR: message uses characters not specified in charset 'ISO-8859-1' - possibly use 'iso-8859-13' instead?". OK, so this is not too cryptic, but it does not indicate which characters were found, and when I went to switch to iso-8859-13, I found that it was the Baltic character set, which confused me. I didn't know it was the curly quotes that were causing the problem, so I had to spend a bit of time figuring that out. More concisely, my problem is this: When a character which is not part of the character set in use for creating the message is inserted into that message, the error message (that the user does not see until trying to post the message) is too vague. Steps to reproduce: 1. Create a new message in Pan, and ensure that the characterset is 'ISO-8859-1'. 2. Copy any text including curly quotation marks from Mozilla (likely all other programs as well). For example, the 3rd definition listed for Motor at http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=motor&r=67 3. Paste the text into Mozilla. 4. Post the message. Actual results: "ERROR: message uses characters not specified in charset 'ISO-8859-1' - possibly use 'iso-8859-13' instead?" Expected results: Any of the following: 1. When inserting the illegal character, a warning that the character is not a part of the characterset being used, with the error dialog box revealing specifically which character is in question. -or- 2. When attempting to post the message containing the character that is not a part of the characterset, the error message displayed should inform the user which character was found to be in error. -or- 3. Very shortsighted, but if the characterset is set to 'ISO-8859-1', and the user inserts a curly quote, simply replace this with a straight quote.
I went with option #2 in CVS: http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/cvsview2.cgi?diff_mode=context&whitespace_mode=show&subdir=pan/pan&command=DIFF_FRAMESET&file=message-window.c&rev1=1.387&rev2=1.388&root=/cvs/gnome http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/cvsview2.cgi?diff_mode=context&whitespace_mode=show&subdir=pan&command=DIFF_FRAMESET&file=ChangeLog&rev1=1.1961&rev2=1.1962&root=/cvs/gnome