Back from hacking [1].
And it's been an interesting session. Learned quite a bit, and picked up some new tricks as well.
I'm doing some testing when I copy-n-pasted the following:
sensor—and? How did **that** happen? Let's look at the O'Reilly source [2] from which Cory copy and pasted:
> > The phone has become a platform, moving beyond mere voice to smart mobile sensor—and back to phone again, by way of voice-over-IP.
>
“Sam Ruby: Copy and Paste [3]”
The program I wrote would classify the text as UTF-8, then iconv() would return an error. I rewrote the conversion routine so that when it failed (iconv() would return where it failed doing the conversion) I would re-classify the remaining text and continue.
Doing that, the text fragment above would be first tagged as UTF- 8, then WINDOWS-1252 and displayed it correctly:
sensor—and? How did that happen? Let's look at the O'Reilly source from which Cory copy and pasted:
The phone has become a platform, moving beyond mere voice to smart mobile sensor—and back to phone again, by way of voice-over-IP.
But if I copied the text twice, it would still be tagged as first UTF-8 then WINDOWS-1252, but the second copy would be incorrect:
sensor—and? How did that happen? Let's look at the O'Reilly source from which Cory copy and pasted:
The phone has become a platform, moving beyond mere voice to smart mobile sensor—and back to phone again, by way of voice-over-IP.
sensor—and? How did that happen? Let's look at the O'Reilly source from which Cory copy and pasted:
The phone has become a platform, moving beyond mere voice to smart mobile sensor—and back to phone again, by way of voice-over-IP.
Not really sure how to handle that (“garbage in, garbage out” and all that) but it's a lot better than things were before. All that was left was to add some more code to allow plain text or HTML formatted text and a preview mode[DELETED-; I put it online so those of you who are curious can play around with it-DELETED].
The trick I learned (an epiphany if you will): I added the following to the code:
>
```
volatile int g_debug = 1;
while(g_debug)
;
```
That will cause the program to just sit there, doing vast amounts of nothing really fast. The reason for such a weird thing is that debugging a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) program (and yes, this is written in C—don't ask) is not easy (I used to go through quite a bit of rigamarole to simulate the webserver environment so I could use a debugger). This trick allows the webserver to run the program (which will just sit there) and then I can then use gdb to attach to the running process to debug it (once in, I set my breakpoint, then do set g_debug=0 and resume execution of the program—wish I knew about this eight years ago).
Another amusing thing I learned—that the “/” character in Firefox will bring up a search box. It's not a bad thing, until you try typing a “/” in a <TEXTAREA> field. Then it gets right down annoying.
Now to take what I have and integrate it.
[2] http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/create/e_sess
[3] http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2004/09/23/Copy-and-Paste