Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2018 January 29

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January 29

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Is this a record for html encoding of html encoding of....

Many think of having "friends with benefits" as something that kids do in college, but Indiana University researcher Dr. Debby Herbenick tells CBS News that she was surprised to find that such a large number of people over 30 had their last sexual experience with a buddy. <br><br>Overall, the study found that 13 percent of men and 11 percent of women aged 19-59 said their last sexual encounter was ...

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 00:58, 29 January 2018 (UTC).

Around 2000, when XML was young (HTML hadn't cared, but XML blew up with syntax errors) it was very common to find publishing systems etc. which weren't round-trip invariant or even idempotent. Putting content in and out would either increase or decrease their encoding by a level (or two!). Feed them one spare ampersand and away you go, a continually expanding stream of the things. This was often first noticed, or at least stopped, because something ran out of memory and exploded. Multi-MB files weren't unusual.

The typical fix was to strip ampersands. Not to fix their encoding, but to make them automatically go away. Because this was "simpler".

Misunderstood encoding in XML / XSLT, and manager's responses to it, was one of the reasons behind the Forging of the ClueIron.

A few years later, I was going through much the same process with UTF-8. The ClueIron was then dusted off and moved to a convenient hook on the side of my desk. Andy Dingley (talk) 15:29, 29 January 2018 (UTC)