strange utf8 char behavior in blogger using javascript

Question

I'm using javascript in blogger but i'm having a strange behavior using the chars '¡' and '?'. For example, the following code will show ñéúüëò¡!¿? inside the div but ñéúüëò¡!¿? as alert message.

<div id="test">
    </div>
    <script>
    (function () {
      document.getElementById("test").innerHTML = 'ñéúüëò¡!¿?';
      alert('ñéúüëò¡!¿?');
    })();
    </script>
</pre>

If we look at the generated code, we can see that the javascript tag has been converted to:

<script>
(function () {
document.getElementById("test").innerHTML = 'ñéúüëò&#161;!&#191;?';
alert('ñéúüëò&#161;!&#191;?');
})();
</script>

However, I can use an external js

<div id="test">
</div>
<script src="http://foo.bar/file.js"></script>

Being the js file (utf8 encoded):

document.getElementById("test").innerHTML = 'ñéúüëò¡!¿?';
alert('ñéúüëò¡!¿?');

An the result is the expected one: ñéúüëò¡!¿? inside the div and ñéúüëò¡!¿? as alert message.

Still more weird, I can write the following code in blogger, which leads to the wanted behavior, even if it's not too clean:

<div id="div1" style="display:none">¡</div>
<div id="div2" style="display:none">¿</div>

<div id="test">
</div>

<script>
(function () {
  document.getElementById("test").innerHTML = 'ñéúüëò¡!¿?';
  alert('ñéúüëò'+ document.getElementById('div1').innerHTML + '!' + document.getElementById('div2').innerHTML +'?');
})();
</script>

Can someone explains me how could I write proper and clean code to solve this without using external js files?

Mike Samuel · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-21 22:08:44Z

1

'ñéúüëò¡!¿?'

can be written

'ñéúüëò\u00a1!\u00bf?'

which might make it past whatever over-escaping of script element bodies is happening or alternatively

 '\u00f1\u00e9\u00fa\u00fc\u00eb\u00f2\u00a1\u0021\u00bf\u003f'

which contains only 7-bit ASCII code-points, so is less likely to run into character set confusion or over-zealous escapers.

\u00f1 encodes unicode code-point 241. More generally \u followed by 4-hexadecimal digits encodes the code-point whose integer value is specified by the 4 hex digits.

edited Nov 21, 2013 at 22:08

answered Nov 21, 2013 at 20:57

Mike Samuel

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2 Comments

Jorge Sainz Over a year ago

Thanks for the answer but.... why blogger only codifies the chars '¿' and '¡' and not the rest of non-ascii chars? Even if this would solve the problem, I think it is quite annoying writing the chars in its hexa way... try to explain your client they can't write '¡'... and they must replace it by '\u00a1'

Mike Samuel Over a year ago

@JorgeSainz, any answer I gave you as to why would be speculation, but I did notice that none of the letter characters require escaping, but non-ASCII punctuation do.

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