15

Recently, it came up that there does not seem to be a way to support é in the tagging syntax. This seemed like a bizarre unicode bug at first (something which would be especially bizarre from a company which was founded by Spolsky) but then I ran an experiment. I went to create a question in stackoverflow.com, french.stackexchange.com, and christianity.stackexchange.com.

It should be noted: I have a reputation of over 4k in Christianity, and over 40k in Stackoverflow, so I can create tag synonyms in both. I am not a member of french.stackexchange.com.

I inserted the following into a "new question" (without publishing)

[tag:résst] (basically something that looked a little "word-like" which included an é)

In Stackoverflow and French, it turned into the tag syntax and highlighted (such as with [tag:bug]: ), but on this site and Christianity it remained [tag:résst].

Why?

Improve this question
2
  • 3
    The reason for the special handling of accented chars was de-normalization and the need to use sql server text search... but based on Marc's blog post I would expect the tags would be handled equally everywhere. Maybe it is a per-site config-setting?
    – rene
    Dec 4, 2015 at 20:48
  • 4
    I added a "bug" tag because, to be honest, failure to support unicode in tagging seems like a major bug, even if it is inexplicably available on some sites..
    – cwallenpoole
    Dec 7, 2015 at 15:15

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
8
+50

Non-ASCII characters are enabled in tags on a per-site basis. On most sites, they're disabled; no reason to have a [tag:résumé] tag and a tag.

On sites that host a large amount of non-English content, the setting is enabled.

It's also enabled on Stack Overflow, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. Let's blame tequila. I've turned it off.

Improve this answer
5
  • Thank you. Seemed like that was the case, but it is good to have someone be explicit.
    – cwallenpoole
    Dec 11, 2015 at 21:13
  • 1
    Are you positive that most sites have zero need for Non-ASCII symbols? Even on Computer Science we could use them because some of our concepts are named after their inventors -- who were quite often French, German, ...
    – Raphael
    Apr 18, 2016 at 14:09
  • This is similar to the situation on Seasoned Advice and a few other sites, @raphael. The critical factor here is: would you need/want "ascii-clean" versions of these tags anyway?
    – Shog9
    Apr 18, 2016 at 14:14
  • @Shog9 The idealist in me says "no, why would we?" But I realize that large parts of the user base can not be bothered to use reasonable keyboard layout, so yes, we'd probably want those. But there are better ways to accomodate ASCII-typers besides just forbidding most symbols.
    – Raphael
    Apr 18, 2016 at 14:19
  • I think that we should have a [résumé] tag that has a synonym with a [resume] tag. It's the best of both worlds: one tag and we are using proper diacritics.
    – Thunderforge
    Nov 21, 2016 at 7:38

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .