Safari: Problem with accented chars in page titles fixed
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshApril 13th, 2004 • 12:51 am
A long time ago (in March 2003, to be precise), I sent a bug report to Apple about the fact that, when dragging a URL proxy from a Safari window’s address bar to the desktop or a Finder window (in order to create a .webloc file referring to a site), if the web page’s title included accented characters, these would not be encoded properly and the .webloc file in the Finder would end up having a malformed name.
For example, if the title of the page included the French word médicament, then the name of the .webloc file would read “m√©dicament”. Not pretty (and obviously a Unicode-related issue).
On March 31, 2003, I received an e-mail from Apple acknowledging the bug and saying that it was “currently being investigated by engineering“. The e-mail also said that I would be notified “when there is a resolution to this reported issue“.
It seemed to me that this was a pretty obvious bug. So I waited for a Safari update that would fix it. And I waited. And I waited. Several Safari updates were released and none of them contained the fix.
Then today I was visiting a page with a title containing accented characters and dragged its URL proxy to a Finder window in order to save its URL in a .webloc file. Much to my surprise, the accented characters were preserved in the file name!
In other words, Apple has finally fixed the bug. I never received the promised notification, however, so I am not sure which version of Safari contained the fix. It might have been 1.2. It might have been 1.2.1.
Oh well. All good things come to those who wait, they say.
April 13th, 2004 at Apr 13, 04 | 5:57 am
Yes, I have had similar experiences. Still, I guess overall it’s better than no feedback at all!
April 13th, 2004 at Apr 13, 04 | 2:29 am
Just FYI, I have also received numerous of those “currently being investigated – will notify” e-mails from Apple. Some of those bugs were fixed, but I have never received a single notification so far.
The only times when I did get a notification was for bugs that were not marked as “duplicate”. When you get a mail like the above, it always says that it is a “known issue” and the bug is soon afterwards marked as “Closed/Duplicate”. But sometimes the bug is not a duplicate, and in these cases I did get a notification. Apple even asked if I could confirm that the bug is fixed, and when I didn’t respond in a week, they even asked again. I was quite impressed that they were so… interested.