1356194 - Incorrect handling of ordinal numbers with superscript when replying as plain text

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[mike]

Attachment: ordinaltest.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170403080404

Steps to reproduce:

- Receive a HTML formatted message which contains ordinal numbers 1st 2nd 3rd 4th with st nd rd th formatted to be superscript.

- Reply to email using plain text.


Actual results:

Quoted text looks like this:

1^st 2^nd 3^rd 4^th


Expected results:

Quoted text looks like this:

1st 2nd 3rd 4th

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

This is intentional.

Comment 2

[mike]

Why is it intentional? Under what circumstances can it be considered sensible or useful behaviour?

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Well, we have some code that "downgrades" HTML to plain text and this code does some smarts:
Bold is translated to *bold*, underlines to _underline_ amongst other things.

Apparently superscripts also get processed. Imagine someone writes: "x to the power of 2" (x squared). Do you really want to turn that into x2 or rather x^2?

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Attachment: Screenshot of the magic at work

You can see that x^2 make a lot more sense.

Comment 5

[mike]

Yes, x^2 makes a lot more sense than x2 but it's not equivalent to, nor does it render invalid, the issue I raised.

If a message contains 1 followed by a superscript st then it's possible that it means "1 to the power of st", but it's pretty much certain that it means 1st as in first. It's probably the case that the person who sent the message typed "1st" and their mail client automatically formatted the st to superscript. Same goes for any number followed by superscript st nd rd th.

The code that converts HTML to plaintext apparently assumes that superscript always means "to the power of" and that is demonstrably false assumption.