R devel - May 2008 - Double HTML encoding in R Bug Tracking Submission form (PR#11517)

The "New Bug Report" form available from http://bugs.r-project.org/ 
appears to double encode the HTML of the "body" text area of the form.

This behaviour can be seen in submission ID # 11515, where (as an 
example) "??" is converted to "Δ" in the browser
view or
"Δ" in the HTML source code. Conversion to
"Δ" in the HTML
source is sufficient to render "??" in the browser output.

mwtoews at sfu.ca wrote:
> The "New Bug Report" form available from
http://bugs.r-project.org/
> appears to double encode the HTML of the "body" text area of the
form.
>
> This behaviour can be seen in submission ID # 11515, where (as an 
> example) "??" is converted to "Δ" in the
browser view or
> "Δ" in the HTML source code. Conversion to
"Δ" in the HTML
> source is sufficient to render "??" in the browser output.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>   
Well, the repository handles emails, and the report form sends mail to 
the bug repository.

The report form sends HTML codes without any indication that it is doing 
so, so the codes get rendered in the browser view. This latter part is 
actually correct behaviour since the alternative is to mangle all 
ampersands. So the main bug is that the report form is not mail-encoding 
the contents if non-ASCII.

*However*, even with properly encoded mails, the browser view will not 
interpret the encoding, which is particularly annoying with 
quoted-printable (which uses the equal sign as an escape character and 
changes = to =3D). Also, see what happens with my signature which has a 
UTF-8 character inside.

All in all, the whole mess indicates that the bug repository software is 
dying. It has long since been abandoned by its original author and it 
makes no sense for the R Core Team to make major changes to its 
internals. We've been wanting to move to something more mainstream for 
quite a while, but it takes some effort to find out how to move all the 
old pending and resolved reports across.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             ?ster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph:  (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)              FAX: (+45) 35327907