Technical error -- Text fields escaped with "\" characters

[thepaintguru]

I'm a new author here, and my first response to a request was somewhat embarrassing because I found that the sample text I had submitted was escaped (a technical term for when special characters such as quotes are proceeded by a \). The article in question is titled "A Buyer's Guide to Netbook Computers". I verified that the original file was not escaped, and went in and deleted the extra backslashes from my sample. What I'm worried about is that, although this is unlikely, the copy of the file you have may somehow have been escaped as well and I can't verify it. I would hate to end up sending a customer something that looked so strange and couldn't be fixed without a full rights license.

This error isn't consistent, my best guess is that it is produced when the page for article submission is reloaded mid way through. For example, if I paste in my description and the like, but then realize I forgot to change the category at the top of the page. As an amateur web developer, I know that PHP (likely the software that runs CC) automatically escapes incoming strings. Other languages probably do the same thing. Anyway, I don't think this would be a problem on my end, it's something I've seen too many times before server side.

EDIT:

One of my other articles, "A Beginner\'s Guide to Search Engine Optimization", is messed up as you can see by the title. Also, the document includes HTML tags because it's an HTML tutorial, these tags aren't displaying right (either as actual HTML or as plain text) in the description.

[Celeste Stewart]

Hi,
Yeah, I've had a few of those "/" characters myself lately - usually with quotes and apostrophes. Oddly, that's usually associated with Word, but on my recent submissions where I've noticed this, I believe they were from copying text directly off my AC page (I'm trying the non-exclusive on AC/usage on CC thing as an experiment). Maybe I should have opened my Word Doc. . .

As far as the html tags showing in the short summary, you might want to go into the summary section and put a little author's note in there along the lines of "Author's Note: Due to copying and pasting text into this webform, the following HTML tags don't appear as they should in this sample. However, the Word document contains the appropriate formatting." Something like that.

Welcome and good luck!

[thepaintguru]

If it matters, this was pasted in from Gedit I believe, a simple text editor.

This should be fixed though. The way it works is that apostrophes, quotes, and backslashes are characters that have special meaning to web programming languages so they get tagged with a \ in order to make them appear as the normal character. There are fairly simple ways to remove these automatically and return the text back to normal. In PHP it's a single command called stripslashes().

It's easy to forget to implement this everywhere, though :).

[Elizabeth Ann West]

I too have noticed the issue, and it is not consistent on my end if it happens or not using Writer (OpenOffice's "Word") or gedit. I think you are right about the reload due to error, but I haven't tested that.

I would email Support about it as sometimes J. Richards doesn't see things in the forums right away.

[thepaintguru]

Well, I've just checked and verified that if I enter something in one of the text fields on the submit page and then change the category the text gets escaped.

I'll send an email soon about this, hopefully we'll get it cleared up. At least this means that the original document the customer will be buying is fine, AFAIK.