Issue with special character in short code.

  • Resolved lemurianphoenix

    (@lemurianphoenix)


    3 years, 7 months ago

    At the end of this thread (https://wordpress.org/support/topic/links-to-theme-redirects-to-homepage/page/2/) I was talking about the use of unicode characters in the short code for plain-text links. At the end of that thread everything was working fine, but recently when working on my site I saw that one of the special characters was no longer displaying properly with the css style I’d applied. After some investigation I’ve determined that the browser is now doing a thing where it’s automatically converting this unicode character to an image instead of the special character text. I’m pretty annoyed that the browsers have just taken it upon themselves to do this as I can’t apply css styles to those. For the time being I have substituted a similar unicode character (though one I don’t like as much), but I fear that in time browsers will start doing this to all unicode characters.

    From my limited research it does seem like there might be some workarounds, but they might not apply to all browsers and I’m not sure if any of them can be implemented within the text portion of the shortcode.

    I don’t know if this is something that it’s possible to address on your end or not, but I figure it couldn’t hurt to ask. The character in question is this one. U+2600 ☀. For whatever reason, the other one that I use, U+263D ☽, is still unaffected.

    Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can offer.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Plugin Author Jeff Starr

    (@specialk)

    3 years, 7 months ago

    Can you let me know the shortcode(s) and character(s) that you are using? It would be much easier to make sense of everything if I knew for example that this:

    [theme_switcha_link theme="mytheme" text="U+2600"]

    ..was not displaying correctly in such and such browser.

    So it also would be useful to know in which browser(s) the issue is happening.

    Plugin Author Jeff Starr

    (@specialk)

    3 years, 6 months ago

    Hi @lemurianphoenix, just wanted to follow up with this. It’s been awhile with no reply, so I hope the issue is resolved? Or if there is anything I can do to help, please let me know. Thank you.

    Thread Starter lemurianphoenix

    (@lemurianphoenix)

    3 years, 6 months ago

    Thanks for following up. Sometimes things get overlooked if I get too much stuff in my email inbox.

    The special character I mentioned in my original post, U+2600 used in the shortcode “[theme_switcha_link theme=”Astral-Silver” text=”☀”], does not display correctly in Firefox, Chrome, or Edge. In all three the unicode character is converted into an emoji that I am not able to stylize, which I’m sure the browsers consider to be a feature rather than a bug. Generally when the page first loads, I’ll see the correct character for about a split second before it’s replaced with the emoji.

    Though oddly on this page, where I got the unicode from, it still displays correctly on all three browsers and I’m not quite sure why.
    https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=sun

    Plugin Author Jeff Starr

    (@specialk)

    3 years, 6 months ago

    Alright thanks. I will use this infos to troubleshoot and hopefully resolve the issue if possible.

    Thread Starter lemurianphoenix

    (@lemurianphoenix)

    3 years, 6 months ago

    Thanks. As an update, as I had mentioned, I had substituted this character, though I don’t like it as much, ☼ , and this one had also been using always worked ☽. Now the both of those seem to work okay on mobile Firefox, but when I opened the webpage in question through the instagram app, whatever browser is attached to that app transformed both of those into emojis as well!

    Plugin Author Jeff Starr

    (@specialk)

    3 years, 5 months ago

    I found the issue, it’s with WordPress automatic emoji feature. If you disable the WP emoji stuff, no unicode or other characters are replaced by emojis.

    Here is a free plugin that I use and recommend for disabling WP emojis:

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-emojis/

    Install, activate, and the sun emoji (and all others) will be displayed as-is without enhancement (like here on this non-WP page).

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Jeff Starr. Reason: moved the link
    Thread Starter lemurianphoenix

    (@lemurianphoenix)

    3 years, 5 months ago

    Thanks for finding that. I really thought it was something that the browsers were doing based on what I’d read from trying to research the issue myself. Had no idea it was related to some code within WordPress. I tested it out and it seems to work fine and hopefully it will continue to do so!

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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