Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

No. Questions were culled from Tweets with the #AskObama hashtag starting on June 30. Some of the questions did come in close to real-time. I think the most recent ones were 5-10 minutes old when presented to the president.

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#5

Post by js2 » Thu, Jul 07, 2011, 9:17 PM UTC

tl;dr:

  $ python
  >>> print u"\u2019".encode("utf-8").decode("Windows-1252")

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#6

Post by yahelc » Thu, Jul 07, 2011, 9:21 PM UTC

'So do political nerds get to moan because the author referred to Boehner as "the Senator"?'

https://twitter.com/douglas/status/89080894018686976

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#7

Post by anigbrowl » Thu, Jul 07, 2011, 9:25 PM UTC

I find it infuriating that this sort of thing is still a problem. I'm constantly seeing mangled apostrophes in places like Google reader too.

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#8

Post by giberson » Thu, Jul 07, 2011, 9:26 PM UTC

Maybe I'm just a terrible programmer, but I think the author may be a little over emphasizing the seriousness of the bug. To me, this is one of those throw away issues that you keep in the back of your mind. Unless I'm coding something that is extremely datacentric and critical in that sense. But it's not like its on one of my "top 20 must run tests" or anything. It's always one of those issues I ignore or assume is correct until I find out it isn't. When I find out, it's simply a matter of tossing in a code page translation at either the input or output end and I'm done with it.

Or maybe I've just been fortunate enough to be in an environment where an occasional goof of this caliber doesn't have any serious consequences.

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#9

Post by anigbrowl » Thu, Jul 07, 2011, 9:28 PM UTC

yahelc wrote: post #6

'So do political nerds get to moan because the author referred to Boehner as "the Senator"?' https://twitter.com/douglas/status/89080894018686976

Touchée.

Re: Why the #AskObama tweet was garbled on screen

#10

Post by carbonica » Thu, Jul 07, 2011, 9:32 PM UTC

giberson wrote: post #8

Maybe I'm just a terrible programmer, but I think the author may be a little over emphasizing the seriousness of the bug. To me, this is one of those throw away issues that you keep in the back of your mind. Unless I'm coding something that is extremely datacentric and critical in that sense. But it's not like its on one of my "top 20 must run tests" or anything. It's always one of those issues I ignore or assume is…

> Or maybe I've just been fortunate enough to be in an environment where an occasional goof of this caliber doesn't have any serious consequences.

Primarily, this means you don't have to support internationalization - which is hardly a bad thing, especially if you work on a startup, where worldwide distribution should be the last thing on your mind. When your product is rendered in over 80 scripts, including right-to-left languages, you can't afford to figure encoding will sort itself later.