Problem with special characters

[javmarina]

Special characters show up as a question mark inside of a black diamond "�". Example of this characters are á, é, ñ... (spanish), å, ä, ö (swedish). This issue didn´t happen in App Inventor Classic.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/app-inventor-open-source-dev/UU6tm8ZS5_M

[jisqyv]

Where is this happening? In the Companion? or elsewhere.

[javmarina]

I couldn't test it on the companion but Matias said:
"As soon as a type in one or more of the letter Å Ä Ö in the "textfield". The companion in my phone is still on but is disconnected from AI2.
If i use any other letters then Å Ä Ö then it works fine."
I believe I have the same issue, because I always have the error 1801 (Security Error Recieving Blocks from Browser)
I saw the bug in a compiled apk, installed on my phone.

[jisqyv]

OK. I think I know what is going on here. I have a branch where I have been working on internationalization and there are some patches there to properly escape non-ascii characters for sending to the Companion (this is done with Scheme). Sounds like I should extract those and put them in the main App Inventor code.

[jisqyv]

OK, now I am not sure what is going on. I was unable to reproduce your issue with ai2.appinventor.mit.edu (current master branch). I was able to insert Å Ä Ö in the designer in a text box and it copied to my phone just fine. My guess is that every latin-1 character should work. I know that characters outside of latin-1 fail, that is what my patch addresses. Do you know what character codes you are using? Is it possible you are using code points outside of latin-1 that happen to render the same?

[javmarina]

I'm using Spanish letters like áéíóúñ. All of these letters shows up like a question mark although áéíóú are in Latin-1 but not in ASCII, I think.

Example:

[jisqyv]

Can you send me a sample project I can debug with? (can we attach files to GitHub comments? Otherwise just mail it to me at jis@mit.edu). Thanks.

-Jeff

[javmarina]

I can´t send you the app with GitHub, but I´m going to send you the .apk and the .aia by email. There are some interesting things, "�" has changed...

[jisqyv]

Fixed it. You can see the fix here: jisqyv@eb3ee6e

I've submitted this for review.

[javmarina]

Awesome!! Thanks ;)

[jisqyv]

The fix has been merged into our master branch. The next time we deploy to ai2.appinventor.mit.edu it will be included.