'typing' dots being displaced inwards

[cosmicespresso]

@agnescameron any clues as to when that started?

[agnescameron]

ah hm i notice this from time to time: I remember this issue existing already but perhaps we thought it went away. I think maybe first noticed this a few weeks ago?

[cosmicespresso]

ahh this is very elusive - it only seems to happen when the bot double-texts (never when it's the first response to a user message). When did you add that functionality?

[agnescameron]

it's been there for a couple of months, but we're using it more now -- when there's punctuation in a bot's response, it splits the message in two and adds it to bot queue. It doesn't use anything special though: everything just goes through the bot queue.

recently I added in a 'line break' character that allows the bot to text over multiple lines without having punctuation to split them, which is probably why we're seeing this more.

[cosmicespresso]

ohhh ok great thats helpful - yes the \n can totally be the culprit here

[agnescameron]

ahhh it's not a \n though -- it's just appending 2 messages to the queue separately

[agnescameron]

hmmmmmmm.... what it does is splits the sentence into an array, and concatenates that to the bot queue... which is maybe not quite the same

  processResponse = (text) => {
    //check if message pure punctuation, let it pass if so
    if (text.match(/[a-zA-Z]/g)){
      //breaks sentences into different messages
      text = text
        .match(/[^.!?%]+[.!?]*/g)
        .map(str => str.trim());
    }
    else if (!text) {
      text = handleError();
    }

    this.botQueue = this.botQueue.concat(text);

    // random pause before the bot starts typing, as if thinking
    setTimeout(() => this.setState({isBotTyping: true}, () => 
      this.processBotQueue()), this.getRandomInt(1100, 3500));
  }

[agnescameron]

so the regex is looking for punctuation, or the 'newline' character %: if there's punctuation it splits and keeps the punctuation, if there's a % it splits and gets rid of the %.

[cosmicespresso]

ok I will play a bit with that and report back

[agnescameron]

yeah. there's also one tiny hack that I did to make the bot dots appear at the start of rounds (they only get appended once there are messages on the screen) that just appends a blank message, before the bot starts typing. but the dots aren't distorted underneath that I don't think (+ I feel like we'd already seen the dots getting displaced before that...)

that's done here:

      if(this.state.messages.length === 0) {
        //if start of interaction, adds a blank 
        //message to kickstart the 'bot dots'
        this.appendMessage('');
        this.processResponse(response); 
      }

[cosmicespresso]

^ very likely this is the reason, but I'm also investigating whether the trim() function you are using has the results we want (whether it creates a new variable or operates on the existing one)

[cosmicespresso]