303033 - special characters encoded incorrectly for altavista search

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Roberto Ortega]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

When searching for [Mi mamá], without brackets, using the toolbar search it
works correctly for Google but not for AltaVista.  When the Google search
results come up Google shows the sames hits it comes up with when I type the
query in a fresh Google page.  However for AltaVista the results are different.
 When I do it from the toolbar search function, I get the hits for [Mi mam]. 
That is, it ignores my accentuated "a".  A similar difference occurs with the
query [“this ain’t your mama’s”].  Note that the quotes and apostrophy used here
are not the keyboard " and '.  Rather, they are the ones generated by Microsoft
Word.  So for this query Google comes up with its normal results as if I copy
and pasted them into the Google page's query box, while AltaVista gives me the
result that it would if I typed [?this ain?t your mama?s?].  That is, the
special characters are replaced with question marks.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. In the toolbar search box type [Mi mamá], without the brackets and with an
accent on the last "a".
2. With the focus still in the query box, press ENTER.


Actual Results:  
AltaVista shows the results for the search [Mi mam]

Expected Results:  
AltaVista should have shown the results for the search [Mi mamá].  The Google
toolbar search does it correctly.

I suspect many of the toolbar search widgamagits have similar problems with
non-ASCII characters. 

Additional Keywords: Unicode, character set, encoding, URL encoding, URI encoding

Comment 1

[Roberto Ortega]

Here we go again...  The characters in my description of the bug appear to be
all garbled up.  Maybe its bug in Bugzilla or maybe its a bug in Mo-zilla.  To
clear things up, the first term is [Mi mama], except the last "a" has an accent,
as in "my mother" in Spanish.  The second search term is like: ["this ain't
your mama's"�], except that the first double quote/feet character is the open
double quote, the last is the close double quote, and the single
quote/apostrophy/inches character is the apostrophy.  I suppose these are the
Unicode double quotes and apostrophy, but I'm not sure.

It's funny that this old legacy United States English typewriter keyboard layout
stuff is going to be biting us, and the whole rest of the world, in the rear end
for decades to come.  Go get 'em boys (and girls)!

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Here we go again...  The characters in my description of the bug appear to be
> all garbled up.  Maybe its bug in Bugzilla or maybe its a bug in Mo-zilla.

No it isn't. Just switch your character encoding to utf-8 (view-menu). Bugzilla
doesn't sent a charset in the header, becuase every comment could be set in a
different charset. And the automatic charset selector (in Firefox, not Bugzilla)
hasn't picked this one up. Sigh, if everybody used unicode, it would be a lot
easier ...

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Unfortunately, since mozilla.org doesn't ship the AltaVista plugin, we can't fix
it. You can file bugs on search plugins from the Mycroft site at
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/bugs.html - all the plugin needs is a
queryCharset="utf-8" attribute on the search element.