Bug Report: Quote Tag

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1

Just reporting a bug that affects the various quote tags. Namely, if the text being quoted consists of multiple paragraphs, separated in the editor with line breaks, then the quoting function fails to work properly.

A workaround is to keep a copy offline (e.g., in Notepad or something homologous on operating systems other than MS Windows), keep the line breaks in the offline copy, but remove them and insert HTML break tags in their place. However, this does make for the dreaded “wall of text” syndrome in the forum editor, and requires some diligence to navigate properly.

Can we have a fix for this please?

1 Like
2

I’m no expert, and line breaks mean many different things to me. Can you post an example?

eta: Like make a post in this thread with a quote that is messed up maybe.

3

Easily enough done.

If I type in the editor the following:

[quote]Here is one line of text, followed by pressing ENTER twice in the editor

And here is another line[/quote]

you get the following:

[quote]Here is one line of text, followed by pressing ENTER twice in the editor

And here is another line[/quote]

Whereas what you SHOULD get is this:

To produce the above, you need to type in:

[quote]Here is one line of text, followed by pressing ENTER twice in the editor<br><br>And here is another line[/quote]

Hopefully this clarifies the nature of the bug. :slight_smile:

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4

I think a better solution is to use “blockquote”; as I think that is what this tag is for (quoting many lines).

Raw code:

> I like turtles!
> 
> 
> And cats!

Displayed as:

I like turtles!

And cats!

2 Likes
5

I couldn’t figure out how to easily do what you wanted with [quote] tag.

I think when the parser sees new line characters, it auto-creates the terminating tag (like [/code] or [/quote]) to close out the current block. Which is ruinous to what you are trying to do (if I understand you). Again, I recommend blockquote instead.

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6

There are reasons I don’t want to use the blockquote from the editor, the first of which being that I have to indent every quoted line manually, which for some of my posts involving excerpts from scientific papers, will be achingly tedious.

The second reason is that the BBCode quote tag allows me to supply author details for the quoted text, in accordance with the proper rules of citation applicable to many of my sources. Viz:

The BBCode quote tag makes writing such passages FAR easier. Needless to say, I’ll be pressing this feature into service a LOT in future posts!

1 Like
7

Another example taught me that I can’t embed BBCode within the author details, viz:

Italicising the “et al” above in the author citation does not work, but I can live with that. :slight_smile:

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8

What word processor (software) are you using? You could use a find/replace system (either the dialog in a word processor, or maybe a script or macro) to replace all new lines (\n) characters with html (<br><br>).

Another trap to watch out for is that:

  1. Windows operating systems use \r\n to mark new lines.
  2. Older Apples use \r.
  3. Serious operating systems use \n.

That is a “fun” gotcha. Might be best to change:
1.\r\n to \n.
2. Then \r to \n.
3. Finally \n to <br><br>.

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10

One of the good things about Notepad in Windows, is that if you use DEL or Backspace to merge lines, it removes the line feeds altogether. I can then simply insert the <br> tags where I want, which is how I compiled the above posts. :slight_smile:

11

Have you tried Notepad++ or Sublime Text? They are pretty good for dealing with these kinds of issues.

12

I use Notepad++ for code development. For this task, it’s a sledgehammer to crack a nut. :slight_smile:

13

:cat:

This makes me happy.

Sorry, that was a nonstatement of a comment, let me add something of substance.

Not quite a turtle, but it will have to do :sweat_smile::turtle: