Facebook RSS Feed displays Question Marks

[Legendarsreign]

I have attached a picture of my facebook news feed, the question marks suddenly appeared today and I have no idea why, I went ahead and updated rainmeter, because I realized it was out of date... nothing, updated the rss feed url... nothing, restarted the skin and my computer.... nothing...

I'm fairly tech savvy, but code isn't my thing.

Help???

[UnforgivenRevival]

I can confirm this happening also, with my reader. Also with no answer on how to fix.

[Alex Becherer]

that is because the feed uses characters that might not be in your font. i guess it is this one:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2007/index.htm or something similar.

if the font does not have the character it will display a question mark.

this font works fine for example: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcesans.adobe/

[koxaman]

the font replacement does not solve the problem!

[UnforgivenRevival]

I dont understand why the font would be the problem. It has worked in the past with the current setup, And all of a sudden it started placing question marks everywhere, With no changes what-so-ever done to the reader.


Plus, If it was a font problem, It most likely would be localized to one person that changed the font. There is a few(including myself) with this problem. Mine is currently using the normal standard enigma preloaded font. Looks to be the same with the subforum creator.

EDIT: My guess would be that Facebook has changed their RSS feed, And put extra garbage in it. Might just need to be reparsed.

[Alex Becherer]

EDIT: My guess would be that Facebook has changed their RSS feed, And put extra garbage in it. Might just need to be reparsed.

this is exactly what i am trying to tell you. they added some extra characters to it.

the font is the problem.
if the font does not have those characters, it will display a question mark. try this as an example:

copy the value of the measure from Rainmeter's "About" dialog.
open Windows' notepad.exe
change the font to Segoe UI
paste
no question marks. but the characters are there!
experiment with the backspace key where the question marks are in your skin.

[Alex Becherer]

Mine is currently using the normal standard enigma preloaded font. Looks to be the same with the subforum creator.

that would be Trebuchet MS.
and Trebuchet MS does indeed not have non-breaking space characters.

[Alex Becherer]

try this:

first, and this is crucial, make sure your config ini is Unicode encoded.

add this to the measure:

Code: Select all

Substitute="‎":""

the character is invisible, but it should be there if the site has not eaten it up.


and while i am typing this, it seems this tip is obsolete as the Facebook feed is back to normal.

[Kaelri]

For the record: the character was a Unicode Left-to-Right Mark. The problem was not the font, but the fact that our Lua implementation does not have unicode libraries, so it replaces the unknown mark with an error character (?). Alex's Substitute solution is probably the best, though I'm not entirely satisfied with a method that requires a certain encoding on the skin file.

[Alex Becherer]

ah, that explains why i did not have this issue, as my skin does not use lua to read Facebook.

ot: i think the use of Unicode encoding should be recommended for skin files in general, just for the benefit of users that use different writing systems. there aren't any negative side-effects anyways.