Find Gremlins takes the text contents of the clipboard, runs Zap Gremlins on it to find the gremlins, and then displays a summary of what it knows about them. Thanks to AppleScript support for the Zap Gremlins function, I was able to whip up a pretty handy script to streamline this operation. Whereas I want as much information as I can get about them, so I can effectively communicate to the user (and also so I can catalog what types of characters users are running into trouble with). It’s more aimed at eliminating the beasts than examining them. Then I can point out the location of the offending character to the user, they backspace it out of existence, and life goes on.Īs relatively painless as BBEdit’s function makes the task, it’s not really perfectly suited to what I need. But in the meantime, I’ve been resorting to handling the customer support inquiries by myself taking the user’s example text into BBEdit and looking for gremlins. I’d like to add something similar to MarsEdit, so I can spare users the pain of having to figure this out when run into an error dialog such as the one above. Their fine editor, BBEdit, has a dedicated tool just for rooting these suckers and either eliminating them or making them visible: Zap Gremlins. I’m sure there are a lot of different names for these unwelcome guests in text, but I like the one the folks at Bare Bones use: “gremlins”. When you end up with one of these bad boys in your post, the only hint you might get is if you are moving the cursor around with the arrow keys, you might see it “hiccup” a second while it stops on the invisible character. These tricky characters are especially sinister because you can almost never see them.
What happens on most systems when you then go to publish, is you get a very unfortunate error message in return.
So if you flub up at the keyboard and make some wacky keystrokes, you might end up with a weird “invisible character” in your blog post. It takes what you type or paste into it a bit too literally. MarsEdit has a little shortcoming that can cause a vexing situation from time to time.
0 kommentar(er)
