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What characters make Twitter messages truncate?
According to @ihnatko, and verified by me, in the new Twitter UI some special characters take more than one bit to display. Twitter counts one character for each on it's character limit, but when displaying in the website it only shows the first 140 characters of HTML code, apparently. Andy's example was that " shows up as QUOTE, and thus creates a little clickable ellipsis (...) to see the rest, which takes you to another page. This wouldn't be as bad as it is if the Twitter API would pass the whole thing to, say, Twitterrific or Twhirl, but it doesn't–it shows the same thing as the web, and THE ELLIPSIS IS NOT CLICKABLE. Either tell us what characters are one HTML character and which are not (is ' better than "?) or fix the API. Anyone else with a list of these please reply.
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?Couple of niggles with your understanding of character encoding aside (all in good fun...), you are correct that the new UI and API are aggressive with converting certain (most? all?) non-alphanumeric characters to their HTML entities, yet then only fetching the first 140 [non-rendered] characters for UI/API output. This seems silly.
Enforce the character limit on *input*, guys. Then output the entire tweet. Don't get all fancy.
If this is a feature, please kill it. If it's treating a problem, you need a new solution.
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?Oh, but on topic, I've definitely seen this happen with quotes (") and less/greater than (< and >). Others, I'm sure.2 Comments
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Inappropriate?This has been happening to me constantly, and it's making me crazy. It's frustrating because I'm just writing my updates as I always have, using characters I've used in the past with no trouble. Now that my tweets are truncating, not only is it hard for me to tell why, but there's no warning that anything funky is going to happen until AFTER I post and see it's screwed up. What a pain. Do I have to regress to kindergarten-level writing to get around this, limiting myself only to letters and commas and periods? (Oops, that was a question mark; how many characters will one of those set me back? Uh-oh, a semi-colon. Yikes, and hyphens. I'm screwed.)
I’m frustrated
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Very eloquent!
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Inappropriate?Don't forget ampersand (&), that seems to do it too. In fact, every character on this list will probably cause the issue: HTML Latin-1 Entities. -
Inappropriate?My bio has quotes in it, and twitter changed one " to &amp;quot;
Ridiculous! Also, as of last night, any tweets I have that include quote marks get truncated. VERY frustrating. I think it's a bug. Worse, everyone at twitter appears asleep at the wheel.
Evan @ev on twitter isn't responding, and neither is @biz, nor are any of the developers that are on this project: @rael, @mrtall, @vlourenco or @bs . It is as though twitter is asleep at the wheel.
A search on twitter at search.twitter.com for @twitter reveals many upset people. If they do not start their complaint with @twitter, if they put @twitter in the middle, @twitter won't see it.
I tweet many quoted passages, and I can't do that until twitter is fixed. Are you listening, twitter? Your "front-end" fix which as Evan said wasn't supposed to do anything, has messed up everything.
To quote the Twitter blog, "The scope of this project was limited to light-weight front-end work." That is *not* what has happened. This is a major problem and Twitter appears to be ignoring it.
I’m frustrated
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This reply was removed on 11/13/08.
see the change log -
Inappropriate?This issue seems to have been resolved. Good on Twitter for getting around to it, although it did seem to take them a while, considering it had been working before.
I’m glad
