Corrupt character in the alert string

[sekica]

When I click on the 3H bid on this hand

 

https://www.bridgebase.com/tools/handviewer.html?bbo=y&myhand=M-1255425086-1622743730

 

I get some corrupt characters at the beginning of the string.

 

The string should be "It's ogust ...", but the single quote is replaced with something else.

 

I noticed this on some other alerts too, it only started happening lately.

 

Thank you for looking into it.

[mycroft]

The string actually says "It's ogust...", not "it is ogust..."

 

You've been caught by "typecode bug", possibly (especially if the bidder is using BBOAlert (and editing in Word-equivalent) or cut-and-paste from Werd) triggered by "Microsoft smart quotes".

 

The apostrophe is converted to some odd bytecode which, when resolved in your browser's font and BBO's codepage, becomes resolvable as some other odd characters.

 

This is a very common problem, and not local to BBO - and not completely resolvable. Best hope is that BBO uses Unicode, and people who cut-and-paste to do their Alerts do likewise. The chance that their system isn't set up to do that is very high, and the chance they don't even know what they're doing ("it looks right to me"), given that this is a *very ugly* and *very technical* problem, is also very high.